The Sustainable Infrastructure Pension

To achieve the internationally adopted greenhouse gas emission reduction and universal energy access objectives, large volumes of private capital for financing sustainable energy supply infrastructure will be needed over the upcoming decades. At the same time, demographic pressure on retirement systems leads to a growing establishment of capital-based pension schemes that operate in a post-financial crisis, low interest-rate environment and seek for alternative investment options. This thesis explores the innovative idea of linking pension savings with sustainable energy financing needs in a joint approach, framed as Sustainable Infrastructure Pension (SIP). In its basic concept, the SIP scheme allocates its member contributions to sustainable energy infrastructure assets. Generated revenues sustain the retirement system and enable further investments or provide pension payments to its members.
The thesis’ main findings include the identification of preconditions for a successful SIP operation, a quantitative cash-flow simulation of the SIP capital mobilization potential in an industrialized and developing country, namely Germany and the Seychelles and a qualitative assessment of positive and negative SIP implications. Although those implications are highly country specific and the SIP design needs to reflect individual country characteristics, a generalization of favorable key patterns, most notably a broad coverage of work force, is possible and indicates applicability to many different contexts. Thus, this thesis’ findings suggest the implementation of SIP schemes as a solution to address pension reform challenges and to support and finance ambitious and rapid energy transitions in many developing and industrialized countries.