‘More capital available’ for renewable energy investments in 2026

At this year’s Solar Finance & Investment Europe event, for instance, panellists at the London summit expressed caution about investing in renewables due to the need to co-locate battery energy storage systems (BESS) with generating assets, and the complexities that come with that pressure, and the looming challenge of a lack of grid availability across the continent.

“Like many forms of capital, where people are making money, capital flows into the industry,” Kaminsky explains. “When I first entered insurance—call it a decade ago—I had heard of a hard and soft investment cycle [and] now we’re seeing it in reality.”

He goes on to explain the difference between these cycles: in hard cycles, insurance rates go up, terms and conditions are more constrained and it can be harder to secure investment; in soft cycles, meanwhile, there is more capital easily available.

While he notes that this is not true for every sector—and he speaks specifically about insurance, which he described as “another form of finance”—he notes that “there’s more capital available for risk and risk exposure”.

“From a client perspective, it means there are more people who want premiums, so that tends to put pressure on rates, and that happens on the back of a few profitable years for insurers and re-insurers, which we’ve seen,” he says. “We’ve been pretty light, globally, from a natural catastrophe perspective and insurers and re-insurers, globally, have made money, so capital flows into the segment, people want to get some of that exposure.

Policy risk versus physical risk

When asked about factors affecting renewable energy investment appetite, Kaminsky says that changes in some of these longer-term investment profile cycles are perhaps more influential on investment decisions than more dramatic, short-term changes, such as changing renewable energy policy in the US.

“If I think of the world of property insurance [and] natural catastrophe-exposed property insurance, the underlying volatility that I look at has changed,” he explains. “You have some form of predictability—you’re going to have a hurricane season—[but] now you’re seeing a lot more losses from things like hail; a decade ago hail was considered a secondary peril.

“Today, in the US, hail is the number one driver for all properties’ exposure, not just renewables,” he says. “You see this dynamic, how the underlying volatility is changing.”

Hail is perhaps the most obvious example of changes to these long-term cycles. Kaminsky notes that these cycles can typically last four to five years, but just this week VDE Americas added a new wrinkle to its own hail risk model, in the form of new wind data, highlighting the speed at which perceptions of and conclusions drawn from cycles can change.

However, while Kaminsky notes that the current US political landscape has certainly created additional “volatility” from a project financing perspective—a topic that was brought up often at the Solar Media event held in February—this is less impactful on the insurance sector in particular.

“From an insurance perspective [it’s] probably a bit less exposed [to policy risk]; most of the time you’re not underwriting policy risk directly with an insurance policy,” he says. “If you’re infrastructure capital, and you’re deciding to invest in a project to get permits, you’re much more exposed to that [policy risk] environment. Typically, insurance comes in at the time you’re starting construction.”

‘We’ve been financing renewables for a long time’

The renewable energy investment space may be changing at speed—just this week kWh Analytics itself was acquired by speciality insurer Beazley—but Kaminsky is confident that these moving parts will not dissuade investments into renewable energy in the long-term.

“We’ve been financing renewables for a long time and we’ve been insuring renewables for a long time,” he explained. “Dealing with complicated offtake structures and pairing solar and storage and wind facilities together, I don’t think, is a level of complexity that’s challenging in today’s market.

“It certainly requires a little bit more diligence, but those mechanisms exist and we have a decade-plus of experience doing this as an industry. That’s the natural evolution of things.”

One area that is new, however, is the growth in demand for power from data centres, and specifically the fact that some of the ‘hyperscalers’ behind data centre power growth are not only procuring electricity from solar sources to meet their power demand, but actively building their own renewable energy facilities to generate the necessary electricity. Earlier this week, tech giant Google completed a US$4.75 billion acquisition of independent power producer (IPP) Intersect precisely to bring electricity generation and data centre operation within its orbit.

Kaminsky says that managing data centres and electricity generation assets requires rather different skill sets, and the fact that all of this expertise needs to be brought together under one roof could provide a challenge for those involved.

“The part where you start bleeding together—and there’s new added complexity—is that you have technology infrastructure, [such as] data centres, where the energy is a key element of that development asset,” he says. “You have all the energy expertise that sits in one silo and all of the historic data centre expertise that sits in another silo, and now you’re either trying to bring them together, or finance them as two different but related assets.

“That’s where you start seeing some complexity, where the energy infrastructure is so critical to the data centre infrastructure; those worlds trying to work cohesively is, I think, the next evolution of what we’re trying to figure out.”

Could data centres follow the precedent of solar-plus-storage?

When asked about the skills required to effectively integrate renewable energy projects with data centres, Kaminsky pointed to the solar-plus-storage sector as one where different kinds of expertise and experience have had to be integrated to help meet electricity demand in a new way.

“There are many similarities,” he said, of these two examples. “There are some similarities as it relates to pools of investors getting comfortable with the asset classes.”

“I’d say investors are fast learners, and clearly those assets are getting financed. That’s what I see over the next 12-18 months, more combined facilities that’ll require more collaboration with the data centre community, at least on the back end.”

This is an encouraging parallel for data centres, considering the speed with which solar-plus-storage has become an integral part of the global solar sector. According to figures from the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA), solar and storage projects accounted for 79% of new electricity generating capacity added to the US in 2025, while 2025 saw a record 58GWh of new operational BESS capacity added.

Indeed, delegates at the Solar Finance & Investment Europe summit expressed a general sentiment that making a business case for a standalone solar PV project is particularly challenging at present, and that solar-plus-storage is widely thought of as a superior combination of technologies, from an investment perspective.

“There are some new architectures in data centres, but they’re not a new asset class, whereas storage was,” notes Kaminsky, highlighting how this comparison is not one-to-one. He adds that data centre operators and renewable energy asset managers are “still operating kind of independently,” however, but that he expects this to change in the future.

“We don’t see a lot of data centre exposures coming through our pipeline, even though a lot of them are powering data centres,” he says. “I think you’ll see more blended finance and insurance structures, and that will require new forms of collaboration than have existed in the past.”

After five editions of Large Scale Solar USA, the event becomes SolarPLUS USA to mirror where the market is heading. The 2026 edition, held in Dallas, Texas, on 24-25 March, will bring together developers, investors and utilities to discuss managing hybrid assets, multi-state pipelines, power demand increase from data centres and AI as well as the co-location of solar PV with energy storage in a complex grid. For more details and how to attend the event, visit the website here.