Annesley Wallace/Featured image by Healthcare of Ontario Pension Plan
The Healthcare of Ontario Pension Plan named energy and infrastructure veteran Annesley Wallace as its new president and chief executive officer on Monday.
While Wallace will advance strategic goals across the organization, the board of trustees at the over US $18 billion fund appointed the midstream energy executive to assume the role at a time when it is rapidly expanding its fairly new infrastructure portfolio.
Wallace is set to replace current CEO Jeff Wendling, who announced his retirement earlier this year after more than 25 years at HOOPP, including four years as chief executive.
Wallace is currently an executive vice president at TC Energy, an Alberta-based natural gas pipeline and power generation company with a market cap of $50 billion, where she works on corporate strategy, corporate development efforts and capital allocation.
Wallace brings a wealth of infrastructure and energy experience to HOOPP’s portfolio. She spent a total of nine non-consecutive years at the $133.6 billion Ontario Municipal Employees Retirement System, where she most recently was the global head of the fund’s $32 billion infrastructure investment business.
At HOOPP, Wallace will step into a portfolio with a relatively young infrastructure strategy comprised of investments in sectors like data, power generation and transmission, energy, transportation and utilities. While the rest of the so-called Maple 8 pension funds—a group of the largest Canadian funds including bigwigs like CDPQ , OTPP and CPP Investments—jumped into infrastructure investing at the turn of the millennium, HOOPP waited until 2019 to dive into the asset class.
Since then, the infrastructure portfolio has grown rapidly, reaching $5.7 billion at the end of 2023, made up of a combination of direct deals and a small number of private infrastructure funds and related co-investments.
In 2021, for example, HOOPP was a part of a consortium of investors that backed Brookfield Asset Management’s take-private of AusNet, an Australian electricity and gas network provider. The deal valued the company at A$11 billion ($7.8 billion USD).
Most recently, in April, the pension plan joined Generate Capital and Australian corporate pension fund HESTA in a $650 million deal in renewable infrastructure. The consortium will help finance the development of US-based solar and energy storage projects from Pine Gate Renewables.
As inflation ramped up in recent years, limited partners flocked to infrastructure funds, attracted by the asset class’s countercyclical nature and largely inflation-resistant returns.
The asset class has benefited from increased demand for energy transition infrastructure assets, like electric vehicle charging stations and carbon capture technology; increased government support for infrastructure projects; lowering operating costs; and growing energy needs. Q1 2024 marked the fifth consecutive quarter in which real asset funds—made up largely of infrastructure investments—generated the highest year-over-year average return of all private market strategies, followed by PE, according to PitchBook’s Global Fund Performance report.
HOOPP also filters its investments across asset classes to adhere to its commitment to achieve net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. In its infrastructure and private equity portfolios, HOOPP often uses shareholder activism through proxy voting and engagement activities to encourage its portfolio companies to increase the accuracy of their emissions reporting.
At the end of 2023, the pension said it expected its infrastructure portfolio to grow both in absolute terms and as a percentage of the fund.
Wallace, who will oversee the entire portfolio, assumes the role effective April 1, 2025.
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