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Private-Equity Firm Invests in Utility Services Venture East Coast Power

Jan. 27, 2025
The companies plan to lean on acquisitions to expand nationally and into Canada.

A private-equity investment firm has acquired a majority stake in a young utility services company aiming to become a national player.

Terms of the investment by Alvarez & Marsal Capital Partners in East Coast Power LLC—which markets maintenance, repair, upgrade, restoration and emergency response work—aren’t being disclosed and company representatives said they aren’t yet ready to discuss their plans in detail. But they did they are aiming to grow East Coast Power, which was founded in 2023 by Darren Donohue and is based in Albany, both organically and through acquisitions, including in parts of Canada.

“We are excited to take this next step in bringing Darren and his team into our portfolio,” Ryan McCarthy, an Alvarez & Marsal partner, said in a statement. “The company is addressing the mission-critical issue of North America’s power grids, which require significant infrastructure investments and reliable services from companies like ECP to effectively address ever increasing power demands.”

Before starting East Coast Power, Donohue was president and CEO of D&D Power Inc., an electrical contractor that was acquired in 2018 by BHI Energy. Donohue stayed with BHI until mid-2023.

The utility infrastructure services market East Coast Power is looking to help consolidate is huge and growing: Analysts at S&P Global recently said that U.S. utilities’ capital budgets will grow to nearly $200 billion annually in the next three years compared to “only” $144 billion in 2022. And Goldman Sachs researchers say global spending on net-zero energy transition projects is roughly $3 trillion annually.

The market also is very fragmented: In the prospectus for its initial public offering last year, Centuri Holdings Inc. executives cited ENR and S&P Global research stating that the five largest utility service providers—which include Quanta Services Inc. and Centuri—claimed only 18% of the industry’s revenues in 2022.

About the Author

Geert De Lombaerde | Senior Editor

A native of Belgium, Geert De Lombaerde has more than two decades of business journalism experience and writes about markets and economic trends for Endeavor Business Media publications T&D WorldHealthcare Innovation, IndustryWeek, FleetOwner and Oil & Gas Journal. With a degree in journalism from the University of Missouri, he began his reporting career at the Business Courier in Cincinnati and later was managing editor and editor of the Nashville Business Journal. Most recently, he oversaw the online and print products of the Nashville Post and reported primarily on Middle Tennessee’s finance sector as well as many of its publicly traded companies.

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