From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By Audrey Streb

Major global asset managers including BlackRock and Blackstone have been looking to buy power utilities across America in a move that some industry insiders warn could harm consumers, raise electricity costs and advance a climate-driven energy agenda.

In recent months, Blackstone reportedly sought regulatory approval to buy utilities in New Mexico and Texas all while a BlackRock-led group won approval Friday to purchase a major utility in Minnesota. While BlackRock and other huge asset managers have distanced themselves from environmental, social and governance (ESG) investment practices in recent years, some energy experts and consumer advocates that spoke to the Daily Caller News Foundation are concerned that buying up utilities may represent a new frontier of financial giants orchestrating “climate mandates.”

“BlackRock isn’t just influencing utilities anymore, they’re buying them. After years of ESG-driven coercion that pushed utilities to abandon reliable energy in favor of China-dependent renewables, BlackRock is now taking direct control. The result will be more of the same: higher costs, weaker grids, and millions in unpaid bills, all driven by the very climate mandates they lobbied for,” Jason Isaac, CEO of the American Energy Institute, told the DCNF. “Minnesotans should brace for more unreliable power, rising rates, and a media narrative that blames Trump for ending taxpayer-funded handouts instead of holding the woke politicians and Wall Street elites responsible for the crisis.”

Electricity demand is on the rise after years of stagnancy as the artificial intelligence (AI) race ushers in the build out of power-hungry data centers. Utility costs are also spiking as demand takes off in a trend that dates back to the Biden administration.

Against this backdrop, private investment titans like BlackRock and Blackstone are reportedly moving to buy power utility companies and invest in data center expansions and startups.

Minnesota recently granted the BlackRock-led group known as Global Infrastructure Partners (GIP) approval to buy one of the state’s major power utilities, Allete. GIP is also reportedly on the cusp of acquiring the major energy company, AES, according to sources familiar with the matter that spoke with Reuters. The Financial Times reported that the deal may be for $38 billion.

BlackRock referred the DCNF to Allete’s statement on regulators approving its partnership with GIP and declined to comment further for this story.

Allete’s statement notes that the impending partnership with the BlackRock-led group includes “guaranteed access to capital to fund ALLETE’s five-year plan for advancing transmission and renewable energy goals [and a] $50 million Clean Firm Technology Fund to support regional clean-energy projects and partnerships.”

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) renewed BlackRock’s ability to own up to 20% of utility voting shares in April, with former FERC Commissioner Mark Christie stating that BlackRock “pledged not to use its holdings to influence utility management” and that utilities need the access to capital.

Christie also warned in September 2024 that “this is an issue that deserves much greater scrutiny” and that “the influence that large shareholders, BlackRock or otherwise, can potentially exert across the consumer-serving utility industry should not be underestimated.”

Blackstone has reportedly sought regulatory approval to buy out the Public Service Company of New Mexico and Texas New Mexico Power Co. recently, according to The Associated Press. The asset management giant also secured a 19.9% stake in a Northern Indiana public utility for over $2 billion in January 2024.

“Blackstone’s sustainability strategy prioritizes accelerating decarbonization by investing in the energy transition and driving value accretive emissions reduction in our portfolio,” Blackstone’s 2024 sustainability report states. “We believe the transition to cleaner energy creates meaningful investment opportunities for private capital. For over a decade, we have pursued attractive investments in companies and assets that are part of the global energy transition as part of our broader energy investing strategy.”

Blackstone also announced on Sept. 15 that private equity funds affiliated with Blackstone Energy Transition Partners will acquire the Pennsylvania-based Hill Top Energy Center natural gas plant for almost $1 billion. The company also announced in July that funds managed by Blackstone Infrastructure and Blackstone Real Estate would invest over $25 billion to help build out Pennsylvania’s energy infrastructure to support the AI “revolution.”

“Renewable” energy goals and ESG investment tend to align with emissions-reduction targets, with some power companies, utilities and states that set goals to cut emissions striving to retire conventional energy sources like coal plants. Isaac added that companies like American Electric Power, in which BlackRock owns a significant stake, have been decommissioning coal plants and replacing them with intermittent sources like solar.

“What happens is when the wind stops blowing and the sun stops shining, then you have to ramp those generational assets back up, and that’s when price spikes happen,” Isaac said.

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill professor of finance Greg Brown told the AP that the reason behind these buyouts are “very simple. Because there’s a lot of money to be made.”

Other experts devoted to consumer protection like Executive Director of Consumers’ Research Will Hild told the DCNF that investment companies like BlackRock stand to gain more than just a profit from these purchases.

“There is no world in which BlackRock’s ownership of American energy benefits ordinary American consumers,” Hild told the DCNF. “This is the same firm that proudly brought us the radical ESG rules and Net-Zero nonsense that forced all our energy bills to skyrocket. We wouldn’t have the scourge of woke capitalism without Larry Fink, who already controls nearly $13 trillion in assets and has been sued for violating anti-trust laws.”

ESG investors weigh a company by its social and environmental choices as well as its finances in a move that critics say bogs down businesses with new costs while doing little to combat climate change. One August 2023 InfluenceMap report showed that as Republicans at the state level and in Congress ramped up their opposition to ESG-focused practices, BlackRock and other major U.S. asset managers decreased their support for climate-related resolutions.

BlackRock CEO Larry Fink also said in June 2023 that he no will no longer use the term ESG because it has been “politicized,” less than a year after he noted that climbing energy prices are “accelerating” the green energy transition.

“BlackRock has backpedaled on its ESG messaging and its aggressive, unapologetic imposition of ESG on everything they touch. But the leopard hasn’t changed its spots,” President of the Heartland Institute James Taylor told the DCNF. “It still has the same management group with the same values, and it’s still doing whatever it can to impose ESG on everything it touches, in actuality, if not in name.”

Taylor argued that whether BlackRock buys or acquires a large stake of a utility, it “can now assert itself over legislatures in dictating energy policy.”

Notably, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the Department of Justice (DOJ) threw their weight behind an antitrust lawsuit against major asset managers that alleges the firms colluded to tank coal production with their embrace of zero-emissions goals in May.

The lawsuit, backed by 11 state attorneys general, alleges that BlackRock and multiple other asset managers used their market power to suppress coal production, thereby hurting consumers by causing the price of coal to climb.

The DOJ and FTC’s “support for this baseless case undermines the Trump Administration’s goal of American energy independence,” a BlackRock spokesperson previously told the DCNF. “As we made clear in our earlier motion to dismiss, this case is trying to re-write antitrust law and is based on an absurd theory that coal companies conspired with their shareholders to reduce coal production.”

From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By Audrey Streb

Republican Utah Sen. John Curtis is reportedly planning to co-lead a delegation to the annual U.N. climate change conference, which some critics told the Daily Caller News Foundation clashes with President Donald Trump’s energy agenda.

Curtis told E&E News Friday that he and Democratic Delaware Sen. Chris Coons will lead a delegation to Brazil together for this year’s COP30 and that three other unnamed Republicans are also interested in joining the troop. The U.N. climate change conference is set to host several youth-led climate forums and discuss the Paris Agreement that Trump directed the U.S. to abandon through a day-one executive order.

“RINOs like Sen. Curtis are trying to snatch defeat from the jaws of MAGA victory by going to the annual UN climate confab in Brazil,” Steve Milloy, Senior Fellow at the Energy & Environment Legal Institute told the DCNF. “There, they will conspire with China and Europe in trying to subvert President Trump’s agenda of defeating the climate hoax, terminating the Green New Scam and making America energy dominant.”

The Trump administration has not announced that it will send a delegation to the November conference and Trump recently called climate change policy the “greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world” in front of the United Nations General Assembly in September. Trump has moved to ax federal support for green energy sources like wind and solar that the Biden administration favored while bolstering conventional resources like coal.

“Leave it to ‘Mitt Romney’ style Republicans like Sen. Curtis to try to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. … The UN climate agenda and the UN’s COP30 meetings should be disbanded, not given credibility by GOP senators,” Marc Morano, author and Climate Depot executive editor, told the DCNF. “This is a pathetic throwback to the pre-Trump Republicanism of George H. Bush, George W. Bush, John McCain, and Mitt Romney. … The UN climate agenda has quite literally overseen the outsourcing of the West’s once dominant industries to China, India, and the developing world. The U.S., Canada, and Europe have boasted about emission accounting tricks, while China builds two new coal plants a week and benefits from the West’s attempts at a ‘green transition.’ The U.S. does not need ‘a seat at the table’ at the UN climate summit, we need to knock the table over.”

Curtis has historically split with many Republicans over climate change policy and has notably advocated against a wholesale repeal of Biden-era green energy tax credits that Trump railed against. Earlier this year, Curtis told Secretary of State Marco Rubio that it is “really important” to have a “Republican voice at that table,” in reference to COP30.

The Senator pointed to nuclear specifically as an energy resource Republicans could elevate at COP30.

Critics like Milloy, Morano and President of the Heartland Institute James Taylor told the DCNF that COP30 should not be endorsed by Republican participation as it runs counter to Trump’s energy policies and suggests that the left-leaning climate talking points the president has fought hold legitimacy.

“Republicans who attend COP30 for any reason other than to mock it are hypocrites and grandstanders,” Taylor told the DCNF. “How much carbon dioxide are they going to spew into the atmosphere merely so they can have a ‘photo op’ at a portion of the Amazon rainforest that was destroyed in order to create a venue for this vacation conference of UN bureaucrats?”

Notably, developers razed portions of the Amazon rainforest to construct a road for COP30, and a 2024 study released right before COP29 showed that emissions rise sharply during major conferences due to private jet travel.