In Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass, Alice finds herself in a race with the Red Queen, but to her dismay, no matter how fast Alice runs, she finds herself in the same spot. “It takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place,” the queen tells Alice. “If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!” This “Red Queen Effect” has become both a hypothesis for evolutionary biology (a species must continually adapt and evolve in order to survive) and a metaphor for business success. Infrastructure investors looking to keep pace with the energy transition also might take a page from Carroll’s book because in a fast-moving market that demands evolution, staying in one’s comfort zone — essentially running in place — is the same as falling behind.
The clean energy universe is expanding rapidly, opening the doors to emerging subasset classes such as hydrogen, battery storage, renewable natural gas and carbon-captu