We discuss an offshore renewable insurance consortium launched by SCOR and Acrisure Re and EDPR's acquisition of Australian renewables firm ITPD to expand in the Asia Pacific. Plus, a look at the rising budget costs for clean energy tax credits in the U.S. Inflation Reduction Act and what it could mean for the growth of wind, solar and electric vehicles.







Allen Hall: I'm Allen Hall, president of Weather Guard Lightning Tech, and I'm here with the founder and CEO of IntelStor, Phil Totaro, and the chief commercial officer of Weather Guard, Joel Saxum. And this is your News Flash. News Flash is brought to you by our friends at IntelStor. If you need actionable information about renewable projects or technologies, check out IntelStor at IntelStor.com.



Reinsurer SCOR has launched a new offshore renewable energy insurance consortium with partner Acrisure Re. The consortium increases SCOR's total deployable capacity to over 180 million dollars. SCOR says. Its technical expertise and understanding of client needs positions it as a leader in providing insurance. To the growing offshore wind industry.



So Phil, another insurance company hopping into the offshore market, there seems to be a lot of people putting their toes in the water at this point on offshore. 180 million is not a lot of money in that marketplace, but it does seem like people are testing the waters.



Philip Totaro: It's an interesting thing.



Certainly good to do with a partner. The challenge with offshore is obviously with the scale, like you're saying, 180 million and deployable. Capital is not going to really make that much of a dent in the overall global market, which is, well over, a trillion dollars in investment even at this point.



The reality is that, insurers have seen a lot of losses onshore and offshore. It's good that you're getting, new companies involved. It's, score is increasing the scope of their. What they're able to address. The challenge is that, I think these kind of partnerships.



Are going to be necessary moving forward because insurers and in particular reinsurers have had a really rough go of it. With some of the catastrophic losses that they faced, particularly in offshore over the years where, entire projects have had to have, the main shaft bearings replaced on the turbine or.



You've had other kind of significant fleet wide issues in, in some cases. Overall, it's a good thing. It's a good deal. But it's a market that's getting tougher and tougher to get into.



Joel Saxum: Yeah, the important thing to understand about the insurance market in any industrial capacity, specifically, we're talking about onshore, offshore wind here, is that you don't have an insurance company and that's your insurance.



You may have an insurance company, the broker, whatever that runs the thing, but you may have 20, In an offshore win, you could have 20, 30 companies in here. So if SCOR comes in on a project, say there's, right now we talked earlier today about Dogger Bank A. Dogger Bank A is going to have two, two policies there.



One for construction, one's when they turn into operations. There's going to be a turn off, turn on date there. That, say, we're going to go to the policy when it is in operation, that policy may be written by, who knows, I don't know, Aeon, that's the broker, but the Aeon will have 20 different, 30 different companies behind them, each one of them taking 2%, 3%, 5 percent of that risk, there may be one lead on there, and that lead on something like an offshore wind project may only be 7.



5 percent or 10 percent or 15 percent as opposed to onshore where it may sometimes be 25, 30, 40 percent because, that asset, that wind farm may be worth 100 million or 200 million where you go to an offshore wind farm, it's worth a billion. Nobody has that kind of capital. So a lot of times the lead is someone who really knows offshore stuff Njord, they put that thing out because, the big pro,