黑石完成87亿美元能源转型基金五号募集，规模较上期扩大约55%

Blackstone Inc. has raised $8.7 billion for a fund dedicated to cleaner energy, less than two years after wrapping up an earlier version of the strategy.

The latest fund, Blackstone Energy Transition Partners V, is about 55% larger than its predecessor, which closed with $5.6 billion in February 2025. Blackstone committed $150 million to the new fund, according to David Foley, global head of the firm’s energy transition business.

The strategy invests in a broad range of sectors within the energy industry but generally excludes oil companies.

“The last several years have had a lot of dislocations with geopolitical events, rapid growth of artificial intelligence and a regulatory environment that really pivoted quite a bit with elections,” Foley said in an interview, adding that the firm is seeing attractive deals. “In periods of dislocations we’ve found that assets tend to get mispriced, which can create good opportunities for us.”

“We really leaned into investments,” Foley said.

Blackstone’s energy transition fund invests across hard assets such as power plants, transmission lines and equipment manufacturers, as well as service providers and related tech companies, Foley said.

The new fund has already deployed a quarter of its capital into six investments, including Flow Control Holdings, a provider of components for data center liquid cooling. It has also backed Dresser Utility Solutions, a manufacturer of meters, regulators and infrastructure repair products for gas and water utilities, and provided capital to Kindle Energy and Viridon.

Nearly one-third of the money committed to the latest fund came from new investors, Foley said, touting the strong performance of his unit’s prior vehicles. The third energy fund, known as Blackstone Energy Partners III, generated a 33% net internal rate of return, as of June 30.

The firm has generated more than six times the return on its investment in Aypa Power, the battery storage business it is selling to Brookfield Asset Management, Foley said. Blackstone will get more than $2 billion back on that sale, pushing up Blackstone Energy Partners III’s so-called distributed to paid-in capital to around two times, Foley said. Using this measure, a DPI of one indicates that the fund has returned every dollar investors put in. A higher DPI reflects the net profit returned to investors.

Blackstone is wagering that the rising demand for power requires more capital to build new transmission lines and upgrade and maintain existing ones, Foley said.

“We certainly like grid-related investments,” Foley said. “We look at businesses with patent protection for equipment and that don’t just sell into new build construction, but also have some long-term repair and maintenance contracts.”