One of the biggest barriers to scaling the green transition is not necessarily a lack of capital, but a lack of visibility into how assets perform.
This distinction matters more than most conversations about clean infrastructure acknowledge. Trillions of dollars are sitting with institutional investors actively seeking long-duration, yield-generating assets. Pension funds, infrastructure debt funds, and development finance institutions are not waiting to be convinced that the energy transition is real. They are waiting to be convinced that the assets in front of them are understandable enough to price.
The shift is already happening, and pension funds are leading it
UK pension capital is moving in a clear direction. The Mansion House Accord, signed by 17 major pension providers in 2025, committed around £50bn of collective investment into UK businesses and infrastructure by 2030. The Sterling 20, a coalition of 20 of the UK’s largest pension funds and asset managers, including Aviva, Legal & General, Nest, and the Universities Superannuation Scheme, was announced shortly after, with an explicit mandate to channel capital into infrastructure, AI, and fintech. Most recently, the British Business Bank’s British Growth Partnership Fund secured a £200m initial close backed by pension schemes including Aegon UK and Cushon Master Trust, marking the first venture capital allocation for both. What connects these moves is not simply an appetite for return. It is a growing institutional preference for assets that can demonstrate their own economics: transparent, data-rich, and auditable. Collectively, these moves reflect a broader shift in institutional capital allocation.
British FinTech is already proving the model works
The clearest evidence that data infrastructure unlocks both returns and investor confidence comes from a cohort of British companies doing exactly this at scale. Octopus Energy’s Kraken platform is the most prominent example. Kraken powers Intelligent Octopus Go, the UK’s largest smart energy tariff, processing over 100 million readings daily, coordinating connected assets to ensure charging happens at the cheapest and greenest times, and selling over 700 MW of flexibility through the UK’s grid balancing mechanism, creating a reliable additional revenue stream. The result is that what once looked like volatile, weather-dependent generation becomes a manageable, optimizable cash flow, precisely the kind of asset profile that institutional capital can underwrite. Kraken now serves over 70 million accounts worldwide, with recurring license revenue growing c.70% and a valuation reaching $8.65bn, making its tech arm more valuable than the energy retail business itself.
Habitat Energy (Oxford-founded) makes the same argument from a different angle. Its optimization platform uses machine learning and algorithmic forecasting to manage grid-scale battery storage and renewables, with a dynamic approach to degradation cost management designed to extend asset life and optimize lifetime project returns, not just short-term revenue. That approach has earned it Optimizer of the Year for 2 consecutive years at the Energy Storage Investment Awards, with a portfolio now exceeding 4 GW of battery storage and renewable assets across the UK, US, and Australia. When investors in battery storage can see not just what an asset earns today but how its degradation curve affects returns over a decade, the financing conversation changes entirely.
Then there is Modo Energy, which attacks the problem from the analytics side. As global electrification surges with trillions invested in batteries, renewables, data centers, and flexible loads, valuation tools have remained slow, fragmented, and reliant on static reports, complicating long-term infrastructure financing. Modo addresses this by delivering AI-driven benchmarks, forecasts, and modeling that provide transparent, bankable intelligence for asset owners, operators, and financiers. In short, it turns opaque asset classes into ones a credit committee can actually read.
What visibility actually unlocks
The comparison with mature renewable energy infrastructure is instructive. Solar and wind attracted institutional capital at scale not just because the policy environment was supportive, but because the economics were legible. Output was measurable. Revenue was predictable. Performance could be benchmarked, modeled, and stress-tested with confidence.
The same logic applies to any clean infrastructure asset, vehicle fleets, battery storage, distributed generation, and charging networks. The underlying cash flow dynamics are often structurally sound. The problem is the financial lens. Asset-level data, in real time, shifts the investor’s position from estimation to observation. That shift is not incremental. It changes what can be underwritten, how it is priced, and how quickly it can move.
The instruments that close the gap are the ones that scale
What the market consistently underestimates is how much of the deployment bottleneck is informational rather than structural. The projects exist. The operators exist. The demand for yield exists on the other side. What is missing, in too many cases, is the data infrastructure that allows capital and assets to find each other on terms both can accept.
Kraken, Habitat, and Modo are not niche technology plays. They are early demonstrations of a structural shift: that the platforms and instruments which close the data gap are, in practice, the condition for the green transition happening at scale, not a feature of it.
As more infrastructure becomes measurable and data-rich, the gap between available capital and deployable projects is likely to narrow significantly.