Bloomberg Barry Sternlicht’s Starwood Property Trust Inc. agreed to buy a General Electric Co. energy-finance business for $2.56 billion to expand beyond real estate holdings. The acquisition includes a roughly $2.1 billion portfolio of 51 loans backed by assets such as pipelines, power plants and wind farms, as well as $400 million of unfunded commitments, Starwood and GE said in …

Bloomberg Centrica Plc raised its price for power and gas for a second time this year, citing soaring costs of buying energy on the wholesale market. The utility’s British Gas unit, the nation’s biggest supplier to homes, will increase its standard variable tariff in October, hiking the average bill for the 3.5 million customers on the plan by 3.8 percent …

Bloomberg A clean-power company owned by billionaire Richard Branson’s Virgin Group has taken over a Caribbean solar farm that was damaged last year by Hurricane Maria. Virgin’s BMR Energy unit, which develops, owns and operates clean-energy projects in the Caribbean and Latin America, plans to restore the 4-megawatt farm in St. Croix, the US Virgin Islands, and take over a …