The Economic Infrastructure team at Aberdeen Investments on how resilience, affordability, and sustainability are shaping transport, power, and digital assets
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Maciej Tarasiuk and Ruairi Revell, Aberdeen Investments
Maciej Tarasiuk is Head of Investments, Economic Infrastructure, at Aberdeen Investments. He’s based in London. Ruairi Revell is Head of Sustainability, Economic Infrastructure. He’s based in Edinburgh.
Aberdeen Investments is a global asset manager with more than £390bn AUM, including credit, specialist equities, and real assets. It’s part of Aberdeen, the London-listed wealth and investments group.
The firm’s Economic Infrastructure team focuses on direct investments in lower mid-market core/core-plus assets across Europe with enterprise values up to €500mn, including energy, transport, and digital assets.
Shaun Beaney, Editor of Preqin First Close, asked Maciej and Ruairi about deal origination, sustainable infrastructure, and the power to innovate.
Maciej Tarasiuk: We target the lower mid-market, so equity check sizes of €50mn to €150mn for either co-control or full control. We’re playing in the enterprise value space of sub-€500mn and target three key sectors: transport, energy, and digital. There are very few funds providing that kind of diversification in this space, either by geography or industry.
Our origination is very much focused on primary deal flow. We take advantage of being a lower mid-market investor by being the first financial sponsor when we invest in assets. Our 21 investments have mainly been made through small-scale privatizations, corporate carve-outs, and working with developers. We come in early, benefit from robust downside protection, and look to create an asymmetric return profile. The lower mid-market is relatively fragmented, so there’s the potential to grow inorganically as well.
Our analysis shows there’s twice the deal flow than in the mid- and large-cap layers, so there’s more to go after. The market also lends itself to bilateral and partnership-driven origination. In over 80% of the transactions we’ve done, the vendor has remained with the asset in some shape or form. This ensures a balanced approach to transactions, with greater focus on long-term value rather than competing in auction processes. We underwrite these assets on an as-is basis with a core/core-plus risk profile, then use active ownership to create upside instead of relying on it in the base case. We also divest into mid- and large-cap markets, benefiting from greater liquidity and multiple expansion.
Maciej: The district heating space in Finland is one that’s close to my heart. About seven years ago, we made an investment in a city called Riihimäki. It was a local district heating network. Utility company Riihimäen Kaukolämpö, a core asset supplying heating to the local community, was being partially privatized. The municipality wanted a trustworthy partner because they were staying as a shareholder. But they also wanted to bring in broader know-how. Fast forward to today, we were able to deliver significant improvements in performance and returns beyond the core risk profile, while keeping the targets to provide a cost-effective and reliable source of heat for the whole community.
Ruairi Revell: For us, it’s quite simple. It’s about long-term durability and robustness of assets. Do they stay relevant in a fast-moving, uncertain, and changing policy, technology, and market outlook?
Ultimately, sustainability factors – decarbonization, physical climate risk, health and safety, nature, or pollution control – show up in fundamentals, cash flows, and resilience in day-to-day operations. We treat these factors as we would any other input to an investment decision that’s relevant to long-term value.
Ruairi: Our funds don’t have sustainability as their objective. We’re investing for long-term value in line with the objectives agreed with our LPs. However, many of the inputs to good investment decisions relate to sustainability. We have ten minimum standards across different sustainability factors. They operate as go/no-go gates and due diligence points. They inform the scope of our work, our understanding of risk and opportunity, and how we price a deal.
For example, on the climate transition risk side, if we decide early in an opportunity that we can’t get comfortable with the long-term durability of the asset and can’t price the deal in a way we like, then we won’t look at it because the level of risk is too high. After that, we categorize our assets based on transition risk, where we’re looking at affordability, resilience, and decarbonization together. Those three things coexist – you can only get decarbonization once the other two have been sorted out.
Ruairi: It’s being honest about the importance of resilience and affordability. It’s what I often call the ‘space and time’ parts of the energy transition – how you get low-carbon, local energy to where it’s needed at the time it’s needed. Ultimately, it’s demand response, it’s storage of different durations, and it’s the transmission distribution infrastructure.
There are lots of investable opportunities for us in this space. It could be dispatchable power, peaking power plants, hybrid-type solutions, longer-duration storage, and even gas carbon capture and storage. And also in linking the power system with the heat system. In Europe, heat’s a really big decarbonization challenge. That’s where there’s most reliance on fossil fuels. For example, if waste heat can be taken from data centers or low-carbon sources, it will really start to close that gap.
Maciej: As Ruairi says, finding affordable solutions and more domestic, local production of energy is so important. We’re seeing biomethane supported by governments and corporates through long-term contracts. There’s pragmatism that biomethane is a solution that has existing infrastructure, existing fleets of energy generators, etc, and it’s an effective way of being able to transition.
Distribution and balancing – electric grids and heat grids – continues to be quite an interesting business. And we’re starting to find renewables, including co-location and renewables storage, quite interesting too. The market has moved to a much more sensible risk-return profile where you’re able to move away from merchant risk via long-term contracts.
Ruairi: With the €113mn financing of Bionext Infrastructure in Milan, we’ve built a portfolio of existing biogas plants. We’ve developed relationships in Italy to enable us to partner with experts on the ground who can support us in acquiring agricultural-scale, one megawatt biogas plants operating under an existing subsidy for electricity. We effectively had a CHP plant that was generating the electricity and earning a feed-in tariff.
The Italian government introduced a new incentive based on biomethane, not electricity. The policy rationale for this was as much about reducing dependency on imported natural gas as decarbonization. And Bionext also deals with the treatment of agricultural waste in a sustainable way. We’re acquiring these plants and deploying capex to upgrade them to produce biomethane. We can benefit from a 15-year, government-backed subsidy, which puts it firmly in the core/core-plus bracket for us.
Shaun Beaney is Editor of Preqin First Close. It’s quick, easy, and free to subscribe here.
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Special thanks to Alex Ball and Anthony Cadieu at Aberdeen Investments, and Kiran Sangha at BlackRock.
The views expressed are the opinions of Aberdeen Investments as of April 2026. They do not constitute an endorsement, recommendation, or any other advice, and are subject to change. The content does not necessarily express the views of BlackRock, Preqin, or any of their affiliates. Aberdeen Investments is not affiliated with Preqin.