The future of electricity has a surprisingly old-fashioned shopping list. Wire. Transformers. Substations. People who know how to install them. For Chris Manning, the chief executive and managing partner of Greenbelt Capital Partners, these are the businesses through which a vast change in energy becomes something an investor can actually finance. The electric future still needs someone to bring the cable.
Manning founded Greenbelt in 2021 after years of investing inside much larger financial institutions. The Austin firm formally opened in January 2022, taking an established energy team into an independent business. Its name came from the city’s outdoor recreational parkland. That is a pleasantly local name for an enterprise whose work now reaches from American transmission lines to British electrical equipment.
The interesting part of his story is the continuity. He changed institutions, geographies, and the kinds of energy businesses he backed, while retaining relationships built over decades. The resulting career offers a way to understand the energy transition through the experience of someone who was investing in energy before the transition acquired its present vocabulary.
A new firm, with a long memory
By the time Greenbelt launched, Manning and his senior colleagues had been working together since the early 2000s. Glenn Jacobson, Andy Hopping, Chris Murphy, and Sam Graham were among the people joining him from Trilantic North America. They carried experience across traditional energy, infrastructure, and newer technologies. A new sign on the door did not require a new set of introductions.
Manning’s explanation at the formation of the firm was economic and technological. Renewable power had become more affordable. Developing technologies had opened additional places to invest, including solar, batteries, vehicle electrification, and the software energy customers needed. He described a team whose interests had widened as the industry changed around it.
“we have continually evolved our focus areas”
Chris Manning, on Greenbelt’s formation, December 2021
That small phrase is a useful guide to the larger career. Evolution permits accumulated knowledge to remain valuable. An investor who has worked with power projects can carry that experience into renewable development; one who understands energy customers can look at their software needs. Greenbelt’s founding was the organizational expression of that widening field of view.
The separation also preserved connections to Trilantic. At launch, the team was to continue advising on energy investments already made there. Manning remains a senior adviser to the firm and serves on two of its fund investment committees. Independence arrived with continuing responsibilities, a detail that gives this particular founding story more texture than the usual tale of a clean departure.
Before the batteries, the balance sheets
His earlier career included investment banking at Kidder, Peabody & Co. and the chief financial officer role at The Wing Group, a developer of international power projects. The latter job places electricity inside his professional story well before Greenbelt. A power developer needs financing as well as a project, and Manning worked on the financial side of that business.
He joined Lehman Brothers in 1997. His subsequent roles included merchant banking partner and head of the investment management division in Asia-Pacific, covering asset management and private equity. He also sat on global and divisional committees. These were responsibilities across investment businesses and regions, alongside the energy experience that later became central to his independent firm.
In 2009, he joined Trilantic North America at its inception. He became a managing partner and chaired Trilantic Energy Partners North America. The institutional sequence matters: Kidder, Peabody; a power developer; Lehman; Trilantic; Greenbelt. It shows a founder arriving at independence after a substantial apprenticeship in both finance and the business of energy.
The billion-dollar vote of confidence
On June 23, 2025, Greenbelt announced the final close of its inaugural fund at $1 billion. Its original target had been $750 million. The additional $250 million brought it to the fund’s hard cap, the fundraising ceiling. Despite being the firm’s inaugural fund, its formal name was Greenbelt Capital Partners III L.P. Even a first chapter can arrive with some institutional history attached.
The investors included pension funds, sovereign wealth funds, insurance companies, and foundations from North America, Europe, and Asia-Pacific. At that point, Greenbelt reported approximately $2.5 billion in assets under management. Manning and Jacobson had worked together for more than two decades and collectively deployed over $6 billion of equity capital across their careers.
Manning framed the objective in terms of businesses that were “commercially excellent and critical to the future of energy and infrastructure.” Those two requirements make the ambition specific. The firm was asking institutions to finance companies with a commercial purpose inside a changing power system. The money belonged to a fund; the operating work would happen inside the companies it backed.
That distinction is essential to understanding him. The fundraising milestone belongs to Greenbelt, and the longer investment record belongs to Manning and colleagues across institutions. A founder’s influence can be substantial without every number in the firm’s presentation becoming his individual accomplishment. His story is populated by partners and operating executives for a reason.
The wire has a starring role
Consider CTC Global. In February 2024, Greenbelt and Endeavour Capital announced a strategic investment in the Irvine company, which engineers and manufactures advanced conductor cores for high-voltage transmission cables. At the time, its conductors had been installed in more than 1,250 projects across 60 countries. This was established industrial technology entering another phase of investment.
The attraction is intelligible even to someone who has never considered the contents of an overhead cable. CTC’s products increase electrical capacity and reduce thermal sag compared with traditional conductors. Upgrading the line itself can help utilities make more use of infrastructure they already have. A wire can be a consequential place to put capital.
In June 2025, Google and CTC announced a collaboration to accelerate advanced-conductor deployment in the United States. Their initiative included identifying transmission projects and offering cost assistance, workforce training, and technical analysis. The announcement described the potential to double capacity on existing lines. It was a proposed route to expansion, rather than a blanket promise about every grid project.
Solar and batteries
Advanced conductors
Electrical services
Transformers and switchgear
A thematic map of portfolio activities, not a diagram of contractual relationships between these companies.
The same logic appears in American Wire Group, which Greenbelt backed in March 2026. AWG supplies wire, cable, hardware, and equipment for utilities, renewable energy, grid maintenance, and data centers. Its management stayed in place. The investment brought another part of the electricity supply chain into the firm’s work: getting the right materials to the people building the system.
Someone still has to build it
In November 2023, an investor group led by Greenbelt completed the acquisition of Houston-based Saber Power Services. Saber designs, constructs, tests, and maintains substations and other electrical infrastructure. Members of management retained a significant ownership stake. Its services connected Greenbelt’s investment thesis to the demanding practical work between a power project and an operating electrical system.
By August 2026, Veritas Capital had agreed to acquire Saber from Greenbelt. The announced transaction was expected to close in the fourth quarter, subject to customary conditions. Brian Bratton and the management team were to continue leading the business and retain a significant minority stake. The agreement marked a prospective change of financial partner around continuing operating leadership.
Greenbelt also invested in Bowe & Gant in July 2026. The New Jersey electrical services company’s two founders retained equity and remained in charge. Across the Atlantic, the firm had signed an agreement in June 2025 to acquire BRUSH Group, a provider of transformers, switchgear, and engineering solutions with nearly 150 years of history. Modern electrification has room for very old companies.
A sale, and another beginning
The power-development side of Greenbelt’s work produced a different kind of milestone in March 2026. The firm announced completion of the sale of Intersect Power to Google for $4.75 billion plus the assumption of debt. Alongside the closing, IPX Power launched as an independent power producer, carved out of certain Intersect assets and backed by Greenbelt and other investors.
IPX began with approximately 4.4 gigawatts of solar photovoltaic capacity and 8.8 gigawatt-hours of battery storage in construction or operation. Those units describe different things: the solar figure measures power capacity; the storage figure measures energy. Keeping them separate makes the scale understandable without turning a collection of assets into an inflated headline.
In May, IPX announced $4.95 billion in construction debt financing for its Darden solar-and-storage projects in California’s Fresno County. Commercial operation was expected in 2028. The sale to Google and the continued backing of IPX show two outcomes alongside each other: a completed realization and further investment in power assets still being built.
Austin, with obligations elsewhere
Manning’s educational ties remain part of his public life. He holds a BBA from the University of Texas at Austin and an MBA from Wharton. McCombs lists him as a past chair of its New York council for 2020-2022. His biography also records university advisory and development roles, and service on the University of Pennsylvania’s Squash Committee.
These connections sit comfortably beside the firm’s geography: an Austin base, a New York presence, and investments that extend beyond both cities. The parkland name is rooted in one place. The professional relationships reach considerably farther. His career has kept those two scales together, local attachment alongside institutions and businesses operating across borders.
What emerges is a founder whose new enterprise rests on a long accumulation of experience. Manning’s stated ambition is to build commercially capable businesses that matter to energy’s future. The portfolio makes that ambition tangible. Some companies develop power. Others manufacture equipment, supply cable, or maintain substations. Electricity has many glamorous applications. Getting it where it needs to go remains a very practical business.