Rahul Agrawal coverage in Deal Street Asia: Southeast Asia Private Equity Readout 2025
Rahul Agrawal, Managing Director, Energy Infrastructure at Actis, contributed to Deal Street Asia’s main end of year report focused on Southeast Asia. Click here to read the summary article and read on below for a snapshot of Rahul’s commentary.
Rahul Agrawal, Managing Director, Energy Infrastructure at Actis, commented:
“It’s not necessarily a surprise, but there has been a truly remarkable transformation of the energy landscape in Southeast Asia over the last few years in our opinion.
“Until 2020, the region was very fossil fuel-dominated, but there has been a real evolution over the last few years, and we’re now seeing the rapid acceleration of renewables. A confluence of factors contributed to this—renewables becoming inexpensive thanks to technological and sector maturation, competitive financing for renewables, and governments prioritising clean power with new net-zero targets.
“We think the transformation in the energy sector has been remarkable, especially when you consider that Southeast Asia alone is projected to contribute over a quarter of all energy demand growth from now to 2035, according to the IEA. And renewables are set to meet more than half of the region’s increase in electricity demand to 2035. There’s a clear focus on growing renewable energy as a cost-competitive and attractive option in our view.
“This is particularly evident in countries like the Philippines, where the regulatory backdrop has evolved favourably, with foreigners now able to majority own energy projects as well as government-backed auctions and power purchase agreements taking place. More broadly, we’ve seen new direct PPA and C&I offtake mechanisms emerge in the Philippines, Malaysia and Thailand, so these markets, as well as Vietnam, are offering more large-scale renewable energy opportunities that we’re looking to capitalise on.
“In addition, globally, batteries have come of age in terms of cost and are now able to provide what we believe to be inexpensive baseload power when paired with solar or wind, and the same is true in Southeast Asia as well.
“While the region was initially slow in adopting renewables, the emergence of firm renewables plus battery storage is allowing this region to leapfrog directly to baseload and mid-merit renewables rather than going through the intermittent renewable transition that most regions in the world had to go through. This should all support renewable energy deal flow and sector strength.
“Data centres are also emerging as a key infrastructure asset class, and Southeast Asia is becoming an important market. Actis is already developing a 120 MW data centre in Johor, Malaysia, through our pan-Asia data centre platform Epoch Digital, for example, and we think Malaysia in particular is leading the way as a key market for this sector, given land availability, renewable power potential and proximity to Singapore. That said, we think markets like Indonesia, Vietnam and Thailand are also of interest in the data centre space.”
Disclaimer
The statements contained herein by Rahul Agrawal are as of 23 December 2025 and represent the views of Actis or the source cited which is not research and should not be treated as research. The case studies and figures are presented for informational purposes only and were selected to demonstrate the type of investments that Actis will seek to make. There can be no guarantee that transactions with similar characteristics will be available to Actis. Moreover, there is no assurance historical trends will continue. Historic market trends are not reliable indicators of actual future market behaviour or future performance of any particular investment which may differ materially and should not be relied upon as such.