Renewable power capacity grew by 585 gigawatts in 2024, a 15.1% annual jump and the fastest on record, with renewables taking 92.5% of all new generation added worldwide, per IRENA, the Abu Dhabi-based agency. Headlines belong to the buildout, yet every one of those gigawatts now needs operating, maintaining, and paying for across decades, and climate finance has far less to say about that half of the job.
Distribution makes the operating question sharper still. G20 economies took 90.3% of the new capacity and China alone contributed nearly two-thirds of global additions, IRENA’s figures show, meaning the markets that most need new generation are also the ones with the thinnest operating ecosystems to sustain whatever eventually arrives.
Sheikh Ahmed Dalmook Al Maktoum has organized his investment work around the operating half. Coverage of his Dubai holding company, Inmā Emirates Holdings, describes a shift in what gets expected of private climate capital: not funding paired with someone else’s delivery, but responsibility for whether systems keep running once built. Money that walks away at commissioning, on this view, has done the easy part.
Who answers for uptime after commissioning?
Older climate-finance arrangements split the roles cleanly, with private money providing capital while governments and multilateral institutions carried construction, operations, and risk. Wherever public budgets move too slowly, that split leaves assets stranded between a funder who considers the job done and a state that cannot afford to finish it.
Delivery responsibility has migrated toward the funder as a result. Carrying it means answering for uptime, holding operational risk through currency swings and political change, and remaining in a market long after the opening ceremony, obligations that a purely financial commitment never imposes. An investor structured for disbursement is the wrong shape for any of them.
Uptime deserves its unglamorous definition here: the share of hours an asset actually delivers its service, measured against the hours it was supposed to. Grids, factories, and identity systems all live or die on that ratio, and no financing document improves it once the engineers go home.
Ownership of the operating years changes underwriting too. An asset judged at commissioning can hide its flaws for years, while an asset judged on availability reveals them on schedule, which is why operators and financiers so often disagree about whether a project succeeded. Climate finance inherited its habits from the disbursement side, and much of its reporting still counts commitments made rather than kilowatt-hours delivered.
Why small systems struggle to find long money
Britain’s development finance institution offers a live illustration of how hard the operating years are to fund. British International Investment committed $20 million to Anzana Electric Group in May 2026 to build run-of-river hydropower across East, Central, and Southern Africa, precisely because installations under 10 MW struggle to raise conventional project finance, with costs and timelines that overwhelm their scale.
Numbers attached to the commitment show what sustained operation involves. Anzana targets 10 MW of distributed baseload capacity delivering over 50 GWh of clean electricity annually, supporting more than 500 jobs across construction and, tellingly, operations, with the first project expected in Zambia. Jobs that persist past construction are the signature of an asset being run rather than merely finished, and run-of-river designs trade storage for simplicity, which lowers cost while raising the premium on steady upkeep.
Nearly 600 million Africans lack electricity, BII noted in announcing the deal. Closing that gap with plants nobody maintains would close nothing.
Distributed systems multiply the operating problem rather than shrinking it. One large plant concentrates maintenance in a single yard with a single team, while twenty-five small installations scatter it across road networks, local utilities, and technician pools, each with its own tariff and failure modes. Energy access at this scale lives or dies on logistics that never appear in a financing announcement.
How Sheikh Ahmed Dalmook Al Maktoum structures for the operating years
Agreement design is where the operating commitment gets made or dodged, and Sheikh Ahmed Dalmook Al Maktoum builds his deals long. Durations across the portfolio average near sixteen years by Inmā’s own accounting, signed directly with state authorities so that a named counterparty faces the government for the life of the asset rather than a syndicate that dissolves at financial close.
Continuity runs through a single coordinating body, the Private Office, which manages the cross-border relationships a multi-country portfolio requires. The company’s materials put its footprint at more than fifteen destinations, and its stated bias, assets that must be operated rather than announced, is the organizing idea the structure serves. On his office’s description, agreements write in local capacity-building so that host-country teams can eventually run systems without outside staff.
None of those design choices guarantees performance. What they change is exposure, leaving the investor nowhere to stand except behind the asset’s operating record. Exposure of that shape is rare by choice, since most capital pays precisely to avoid it.
The tests that arrive in year ten
Critics of the model have identified the right question, which is durability rather than intent. Building an asset is one test; keeping it running through currency stress, political turnover, and maintenance cycles is a harder one, and a portfolio spanning fifteen-plus countries will eventually face all three at once. Operating commitments are cheap to state in year one and expensive to honor in year ten, when equipment ages, tariffs lag inflation, and the officials who signed have moved on.
Spare parts, technician pipelines, and revenue collection decide most operating outcomes long before politics does. Each one is a supply chain of its own, hardest to maintain in exactly the remote markets where the assets matter most, and an operator’s budget meets them every month while a financier’s model met them once.
Verification lags here as well. Uptime claims, like project counts, currently rest on company reporting, and no independent operational audit of the portfolio has been published. An investor who chooses to be judged on availability has also chosen the evidence that will eventually judge him, whichever way it runs.
The half of climate finance still being priced
Deployment records like 2024’s will keep growing, and IRENA’s own warning about regional disparity suggests where the operating burden will concentrate, in exactly the markets least equipped to carry it alone. Capital that stays to run what it builds is scarcer than capital that builds, and scarcer still where currencies wobble and grids strain.
Sheikh Ahmed Dalmook Al Maktoum has placed his portfolio on the expensive side of that scarcity, and the wager only settles over time. Commissioning dates are behind some of his assets already; the operating decades, where this model claims its difference, are still running.
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