Abstract

We provide new formulas for the energy of black hole solutions in the anti-de Sitter (AdS) sector of a generic gravity theory with curvature-squared terms. This is achieved by the addition of counterterms of the extrinsic type (Kounterterms) which produces a finite variation of the total action. The procedure is compatible with the boundary conditions in asymptotically AdS spaces within the framework of quadratic curvature gravity (QCG) theory. As a consequence, without resorting to background-substraction, or linearized methods, the conserved charges correctly reproduce the energy of static black holes in QCG.