Norges Bank has excluded PacifiCorp, an US energy group controlled by Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway, from its Government Pension Fund Global.
Image: The fund will offload its bond holdings in PacifiCorp. Photo courtesy of Kiril Havezov/Freeimages.com
The fund will offload its bond holdings in PacifiCorp, an electric power utility in the western US, serving 1.9 million customers.
The exclusion has been done under the fund’s policy to sell the holdings in the companies that have 30% of their business in thermal coal.
Norges Bank said: “The Executive Board in Norges Bank has decided to exclude the companies PacifiCorp and Tri-State Generation and Transmission Association Inc based on an assessment of the product-based coal criterion in the Guidelines for observation and exclusion.”
Tri-State Generation and Transmission Association, which provides power to the US states of Colorado, New Mexico, Nebraska and Wyoming, has also been dropped from the fund.
The exclusions marks the fourth round of sales by the fund after it started dropping coal power companies and mining companies in April 2016.
The sovereign fund has also kept another MidAmerican Energy and the Berkshire Hathaway Energy Company under observation.
Norges Bank said: “According to the guidelines, observation may be decided when there is doubt as to whether the conditions for exclusion are met or as to future developments, or where observation is deemed appropriate for other reasons.”
Companies excluded from the fund in the previous round include Great River Energy, HK Electric Investments & HK Electric Investments, Huadian Energy, and Korea Electric Power, among others.
As of March 2017, Norges Bank had excluded 69 companies from the fund and placed 13 companies under observation based on the product-based coal criterion.
In November 2017, a new industry scorecard from the Unfriend Coal campaign showed that insurance companies had pulled out $20bn of investments in coal and a significant number of them were considering to end underwriting for new coal projects.