Gas, again, is currently AMP’s major source of energy infrastructure opportunity in Australia – its Dampier to Bunbury pipeline is anchored by agreements from producers who’ve agreed to ship via the pipeline for at least 15 years. “We look for distribution and transmission investments rather than power generators, and we certainly won’t take any merchant power risk,” Foster says.

The manager says there is too much uncertainty about where the likes of geothermal, solar and wind power will fit in energy’s future, particularly in places like Australia which still lack a national carbon trading system, and have state-based ‘green energy’ targets of a relatively modest size (for example the NSW regime of ‘10 per cent renewable energy by 2010’). Alternative energy’s elephant in the room is, of course, nuclear. The return of this most controversial of carbon-neutral technologies is inevitable, according to John Buehler, a managing partner at Energy Investors Funds out of San Francisco.

There have been no new nuclear power stations in the US for 30 years, since the Three Mile Island disaster. Only existing stations have been relicenced in that time. However, Buehler believes this will probably change within 10 to 15 years, as a way of making up the shortfall between the carbon emission targets set by public utility commissions (26 states in the US have renewable energy portfolio standards, with California being the most ambitious) and the ability of emerging renewable technologies to develop capacity.

If Energy Investors Funds can be persuaded that a new nuclear power station is safe and energy efficient, the manager has no idelogical problem with backing it. “We need the technology to be tested before we’ll invest. But once things are proven, we are technology agnostic,” Buehler says.

The manager’s willingness to back new sources of energy is illustrated by its recent investments in projects converting landfill gas to pipeline-quality natural gas, and its backing of the Hot Sulphur springs geothermal power plant in Nevada.