“Infrastructure needs to be green, social, and smart”
“There’s a need to move away from the more traditional and head toward more green infrastructure,” says Freek Spoorenboorg, who serves as Head of Product Strategy for Infrastructure Equity at BlackRock, during Calcalist’s National Infrastructure conference
“When you talk about infrastructure, you must realize that these are hard assets essential to society. We use them on an everyday basis: think about roads, airports, etc. Infrastructure increasingly needs to be green, social, and smart. We need to build more clean energy facilities to bring clean electricity to our homes. We need to invest in electric vehicle charging infrastructure, so that we can further rely on green electricity and look to greener energy storage. We’d like to move away from the more traditional and head toward more green infrastructure,” said Freek Spoorenboorg, who serves as Head of Product Strategy for Infrastructure Equity at BlackRock, speaking during the National Infrastructure conference organized by Calcalist, BlackRock, and FTSE Russell.
“It’s a big challenge to reach net-zero infrastructure,” he continued. “We need to build new energy infrastructure with renewable power, if we do so, we’d already address nearly 50% of global CO2 emissions,” he said. “We still need to make more technological innovations, such as in the cement and steel industry and need a lot of R&D in that regard,” he said. “We’d also need to help transform existing companies on this journey. It’s not only about building new infrastructure or bringing in new innovations, it’s also about helping existing companies on their road to net-zero.”
“For example, gas is the cleanest hydrocarbon out there, but a lot of Asian countries are still relying on a lot of coal for energy. We’ve been looking into investing in shipping for natural gas for Asia, which really helps those countries switch from coal to gas. It’s important to invest in that transition,” he said.
You can watch the full interview in the video above.
