Renewable-energy analysis startup Orennia raises $19 million in funding

Calgary-based Orennia’s series B round was led by Boston-based Wellington Management Co., a new backer of the company, which provides analytics for prospective buyers of solar, wind, biogas, energy storage and other projects. The other investors include Quantum Innovation Fund, NGP Energy Capital, Veriten and Tupper Lake Partners.

Chief executive Brook Papau and chief financial officer Tanya Baeza founded the company two years ago to provide detailed financial and operating data to project developers, investors, bankers and corporations. It now has 60 staff and, with the new funding secured, is looking to double that number by next year, Papau said.

“It will let us hire more developers, expand our footprint and move quite a bit faster than we would have simply on our own,” he said in an interview on Tuesday. “There’s going to be a lot of very good energy-transition jobs being created in Calgary.”

The city’s tech and cleantech sectors have been bright spots as oil and gas employment has shrunk over the past decade. With transferrable skills, many have made the leap from the conventional energy industry, including Papau and Baeza. The two previously worked at oil and gas research and data company RS Energy.

Orennia’s growth is being driven by immense interest among investors in clean energy, despite short-term energy crises – notably Russia’s invasion of Ukraine – that have put the security of fossil-fuel supply into the spotlight, he said.

The International Energy Agency has predicted that additions to global renewable energy capacity will hit a record this year, and then surpass that in 2024. But that expansion is still not keeping pace with the IEA’s projection in 2021 that spending on renewables would have to more than triple to $4 trillion a year by 2030 to meet the global target of net-zero emissions by 2050.

As a result, majorinvestors aren’t backing away from the field of energy transition, which also includes carbon capture, utilization and storage as well as hydrogen production.

“Massive US private equity groups are allocating billions of dollars for energy-transition assets. They’re trying to figure out where to put it,” Papau said. “At the same time, there are hundreds of new industry participants in energy transition being created every single year.”

Money will flow into the sector for decades to come, but the remainder of this decade will see biggest rate of change, he said.

A major driver over the past year has been the US Inflation Reduction Act, which allocates $369 billion in incentives to green projects in that country. It has forced Canada and other countries to try to develop their own policies to attract capital to cleantech industries, he said.