There is no shortage of money for the energy transition. Pension funds, sovereign wealth, infrastructure managers and a new generation of private credit vehicles have all committed enormous pools of capital to renewables, grid, storage and the wider decarbonisation of hard assets. Ask any allocator what keeps them awake, and it is rarely dry powder.
It is people.
Capital is abundant. Capable operators are not.
Deploying capital into infrastructure and renewables is not a commodity skill. It requires professionals who can originate in a competitive market, underwrite technologies that behave differently from one another, structure around merchant and offtake risk, and manage assets through a decade of operation. That combination takes years to build and cannot be conjured on a fundraising timetable.
The result is a structural imbalance. The number of funds and mandates chasing the transition has multiplied faster than the population of people who can credibly run them. When demand for a scarce skill outstrips supply, two things happen: compensation climbs, and the best people stop needing to look.
What this means for hiring
Move earlier than feels comfortable. The instinct is to hire once capital is raised and deals are in the pipeline. By then the shortlist of genuinely capable people is already being courted by three other funds. The teams that win hire ahead of need.
Hire for judgment, not for a logo. A CV from a marquee firm is not the same as the ability to say no to a bad deal at 11pm. In a thin market, assessing judgment matters more than pattern-matching on prior employers.
Pay for scarcity, and build a bench. The scarce senior hire is only half the answer. The firms that endure are quietly developing the layer beneath - the VPs and associates who become the principals of the next cycle.
The bottleneck is the opportunity
For investors, the talent constraint is a risk to manage. For the professionals who have the skills, it is the strongest seller's market of their careers. Bridging the two - discreetly, and with a genuine read on who is actually good - is the whole job. It is also why a generalist search rarely gets it right.