After the close on Friday Brookfield Renewable (BEP) announced it would invest up to $1B more in Isagen (Colombian hydro business) - taking its ownership stake close to 40%.

BEP said the deal would add roughly 2% to FFO/unit in 2026 and will be financed by non-recourse debt and available liquidity, bringing us back to the real benefit of its 3 GW hydro deal with Google. Read CEO Connor Teskey’s framing of the strategy:

Let’s walk through this Google announcement to hammer the point home. Included in the initial deal were the Holtwood and Safe Harbor assets (670 MW), which are producing roughly two million megawatt hours per year.

So on a deal the company said is worth in excess of $3B, Brookfield has locked in pricing at $85-90/MWh for two decades. That tracks to reported figures from the company…

… and recent management commentary.

There’s a financial uplift from signing those deals, but the real juice lies in what comes after. You just signed a predictable 20-year cash flow stream with Google as your counterparty… banks are begging you to take their money.

So you slap some debt on the asset package and take the proceeds to go big game hunting in order to fill out your 5-year, $8-9B capital deployment target.

It’s a feedback loop: the more agreements you sign, the more debt you can layer on your assets, the more buying/building you can do, the more agreements you can sign…

… and with big tech’s current appetite for power, the market believes the underlying math. Whether it should is up for debate, and a topic I’ll dig into in the future.