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Season 1 Episode 10: Giannis Komitas Edited transcript

Conversations on Climate Season 1 Episode 10: Giannis Komitas Edited transcript

 

Section one: investing in the energy transition

Chris Caldwell: Giannis, thank you so much for inviting us over here to Athens — beautiful place and beautiful weather — thank you for organizing that as well! Lovely, lovely town square. It’s a great pleasure to be here.

Giannis Komitas: Thank you very much for coming, Chris. It’s my pleasure to participate in this series. I’m very passionate about the energy transition and I’m looking forward to our discussion.

Chris: Me too. Could you give us a little bit of background on yourself and your journey to date?

Giannis: I started as a mechanical engineer. That was my first degree. My first job was in the automotive sector working in the Land Rover plant up in Solihull, in the UK. Then I moved on to Toyota. I spent quite a few years in that sector. It was an amazing sector. It taught me a lot!

At some point, ten or 12 years ago, I decided I wanted to make a switch. It coincided with making a change in where I was living. I moved to the UK from Belgium, where I had moved for the Toyota stint.  This is when I went into renewables — purely on the basis that it was an up-and-coming new industry.

I was really attracted to the whole narrative of trying to do something for the world.  Back then, I wasn’t really into the energy transition and the big picture. I was more focused on the technology and delivering those small projects. I did a stint with a small, privately owned family business that operated out of London. We did some wind, solar and waste energy projects up until 2016-2017, at which point I finished my MBA at LBS. On the back of that MBA, I went into consulting and joined the transaction team at EY-Parthenon. It was all going perfectly nicely, but the pull of renewables was always there. In 2019 I went back into that sector. Now I’m working for a family business with its own investment platform. We’re doing solar energy and we are also trying to start some storage projects — so, the typical renewable energy asset investors.

Chris: Investment has been a very hot topic since the latest COP up in Glasgow, but investment in renewables can mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people. For example, one person’s view of it might be searching for the next cleantech unicorn — or the first clean tech unicorn — and somebody else’s view of it might be looking for long term, stable returns with low risk. What’s your take on the role of investments in the energy transition?

Giannis: The role of investment in energy is fundamental. It’s absolutely elementary in the sense that, for any transition to happen, you need renewable energy generation in the first place. Although it sounds very simple, people look at solar panels and wind turbines and they think the technology has been there forever. It hasn’t. It’s only been ten, 15, 20 years. It’s not that long. What people, perhaps, don’t grasp is these assets need to live for 25 years alongside highways, in the deep sea or near towns, office buildings, parking spaces, etc. Bringing that into reality actually proves a lot more complicated than people think.

It’s still something that has the traditional risk stacking. The technology risk is lower these days but you have the development risk, you have the construction risk, you have the operational risk and you have the end-of-life management risk. Still, where there is a risk, there is an opportunity to invest, and there will be more and more demand for the generation of clean electricity.

Having said that, cleantech is a much broader topic. I sometimes find it difficult to distinguish what is cleantech and what is not. Is Tesla a clean tech company? One could say, yes, it is taking CO2 off of the road — but is it facilitating the transition? Yes, maybe…it’s up there. 

Now, when it comes to investor returns, so far, I think the returns follow the investors in infrastructure. There have been many, many investments in the value chain, in components manufacturing, in networks and in the retail side of things but they have not done spectacularly well. On the contrary, the investors on the infrastructure side have not only done extremely well themselves, but they’ve done well in a stable manner. That’s all you need to keep the taps on for the flow of money.

I think this will continue. People will still be looking for unicorns and people will still be fascinated by very clever ideas on managing the various aspects of the energy transition, but the companies I’ve been working with tend to focus more on the infrastructure investments side. It’s a bit more boring, but it’s also a bit more predictable.

Chris: I’m very much involved in the infrastructure investment side, too. I don’t think I’d agree that it’s boring though!

Giannis: Some people say they find it that way, but I agree with you.

Chris: You mentioned that your current job is working for an investment platform. Could you tell us a bit more about that?

Giannis: We are funded by a family office that is making these investments, not only because they want to generate revenue for themselves, but also because they want to be involved in the energy transition. It’s a US funded platform and we do work with developers. We are not necessarily fully vertically integrated in the value chain, but that is for a reason. We want to be agile in identifying opportunities. Our focus is on identifying those mid-stage development assets that need a little bit of help to get to the ready to build stage and are up against some tight timelines. We can then come in and get those assets built. That’s our main focus.

We are also going into projects that we develop from scratch. We’re trying to go into storage and develop our own battery systems. We’re also considering offshore wind — floating offshore wind. It’s going to be a slightly long-term bet but it’s something that we think might be worth doing.

Section two: shifts in the renewable energy sector

Chris: To put things into context within the broader environment, how has the renewable energy sector and the attitude of investors changed during your 10 or 15 years in the industry? I can remember, when I first went in there, nobody wanted to touch it. It was deemed to be boring — no returns, difficult. You needed to wait for an awfully long time to get whatever paltry returns were available. I’m not sure a lot has changed in that, but people are still chasing it — which is great. Have you seen things change?

Giannis: It depends where you’ve been observing things. I have seen quite a bit of the sector on this side of the world. It’s really been a rollercoaster — big excitement at times, followed by a policy unwinding, sometimes resulting in a slight catastrophe. In my experience, funding has never been as abundant as it is now. Everybody wants to go into renewables. It’s not just the folks that you’ve traditionally seen there. Right now, all the companies want to shift because this transformation is taking effect — you begin to see players from oil and gas coming and players from every big sector. Other industries really want to reduce CO2 exposure as well. Decarbonization is now part of the broad agenda so you see more players wanting to get a piece of the pie. That’s good news for developers but it also means that, when there is too much money chasing things, there can be some bubble territories or cases. One needs to be very careful about how they approach this.

Chris: For sure. Do you think things are likely to change now? We’re in a place where inflation is going higher, where geopolitical uncertainty is going higher, where economies are slowing down and interest rates will be going up at the same time as the economy slows down. These are not good mixes for people looking to invest in long term infrastructure projects.

Giannis: That’s absolutely true. Something that differentiates the sector — I wouldn’t say makes it recession proof, but I think it helps a little bit — is that no matter how strong a recession is, there is an irreversibility to the energy transition. The fact is, whatever happens, in ten years we will all be driving electric vehicles. That guarantees the demand. However, the problem is, people may all think the same thing and decide, okay, let’s go and do it. Again, that makes the valuations a little bit difficult to swallow — therefore it is difficult to make money on the back of it. I would say you need to look for value. You look at what value you can bring in the assets, where you stand in the body, what capabilities you need to internalize and how you can identify situations where you can benefit.

Chris: You mentioned earlier on that the incumbent energy providers — the big oil and gas majors — are playing an increasing role in the transition. They’re investing a lot. Do you see a natural fit for companies like BP, Shell or Aramco in that space?

Giannis: That has been the big debate: whether the utilities or the energy companies are better suited. If you had asked me a few years ago, I would probably have said that utilities are better because they understand electricity better, but the reality is the threat to the oil and gas sector is such that they’ve really pushed a lot.  They are now spending a lot of money building up teams and getting people in. They are definitely very strong in coming into the renewables business.

Chris: the main advantage is of course balance sheets. They’ve got a tiny cost of capital compared to others.

Giannis: They have a low cost of capital and, as I said, they’re very motivated to at least try to do this — not all of them, but many are.

Section three: international mobility

Chris: You are a good example of how investment has become internationalized. You’ve got American investors operating out of a fund out of London and you’re doing significant investments in Greece. That’s clearly a big trend. 

Giannis: Yes. It’s been a nomadic sector from the very beginning. People in the sector left to follow the tariffs back in the day. Investors, construction companies, suppliers alike have been very quick to adopt the models, move people around, deliver projects. There are people who have maintained the same advisors, the same contractor and the same suppliers, and work with them in various places in the world. Of course, once you move, you try to see if there is any local value you can find. It’s because of these nomadic origins that things are like this today.

Chris: We’re now entering a space where a lot of the value has been taken out of the European markets and the US markets. Things are much more compressed. Can you see yourselves expanding into other markets? You say there’s a lot of capital going around. In South America or in Africa, it’s not quite the same. Can you see yourselves expanding in that direction?

Giannis: The short answer, for the company I work with, is this is not a priority for us. We still believe that Europe has a way to go, as does the US. There is this big shift in demand that will be looking to be supplied. The sector, more broadly speaking, is looking at those things. A company I worked for a few years back — a French company — is doing this in Latin America, in Brazil and in Africa. As we said earlier, you can bring your trade into these regions. Absolutely. Yes.

Section four: private sector initiatives and government policy

Chris: Another one of the big trends in the sector is the increasing amount of the private sector setting their own targets, setting their own objectives, which are outside of government policy. Can you see that expanding? And how do you think that is impacting on the investment community?

Giannis: It definitely has some room to expand. The idea is relatively simple — when it comes to energy generation, you can benefit from a direct agreement to take the energy from the generating assets and have an agreement with the asset owner for the offtake. You will get a better price compared to buying this from your utility provider. There is an incentive for the consumer of energy and there’s also an incentive for the seller of energy because the price to the consumer will probably also be a little more expensive than the price that they would sell it for to the utility provider. Corporate PPAs are becoming more and more standardized. There’s a lot more we know about them now, but obviously there needs to be further stress testing and more real-life scenarios. I don’t think companies will go 100% on a private PPA with an asset on it, but there’s still some way to go. 

Chris: That relationship with the utility company is a very difficult one to manage. The consumer of the energy will still, as you say, want to have a fixed line into their premises just in case the sun isn’t shining or the winds aren’t blowing, but the grids will want to be paid a price. It’s a difficult thing to do.

Giannis: It’s a difficult formula to make, but it’s being done. It’s being done in the UK. You have value charges that are being levied on one side or the other and there are sleeving fees — there are ways that you can make this work. It wouldn’t work if people had not found those formulas. Markets that have not yet developed this this framework— and Greece is an example— will either benefit from the already accumulated knowledge in the space or be left behind from not seeing all the progress that, let’s say, UK policymakers are seeing. We will have to wait and see. My gut feeling is that those who enter late will actually benefit by learning from the mistakes of the others.

Chris: Up until now, subsidies have been very much provided by governments — Germany building massive amounts of solar, the feed-in tariffs in the UK and so many other examples. But in the tech world, it wasn’t governments who were subsidizing these industries. Companies like Amazon spent more than ten years losing money every single year. It was investors who were keeping it going, who were subsidizing it up until the point that it became profitable. Now, the motivations were slightly different. For governments the motivation was: we believe that this is an important thing for our infrastructure, for our community, for our environment. The investors in Silicon Valley and around the world who were looking after Amazon weren’t motivated by thinking Amazon is fundamentally a good thing or a progression for the human race. They were motivated by thinking this is going to make me a lot of money. 

Where do you think the investment community is now?

Giannis: The rate at which technology changes makes it challenging to know how much to invest. If you are a supplier, you can easily be caught out. It is so difficult if you are an equity investor or retail investor. There have been so many high-profile bankruptcies and people who lose their money. For retail investors, the biggest benefit is the energy transition itself and the very cheap energy. I think making money in IPPs — investing in the many listed Independent Power Producers — does actually have quite high chances of generating dividends at some point. It is entirely possible.

Chris: What are the weak links that you can see in the various infrastructure roles —in the investor’s role, the advisor’s role, the manufacturer’s role, the grids? There’s a very complicated infrastructure, a very complicated ecosystem, that is required to put all of this in place — including governmental support, building planning, even including the grid itself. Where are the weak links? As the investor, what are you most worried about?

Giannis: Going back to what I said earlier, these people need to understand that these are assets that will occupy somebody’s lands. They will need to connect to a grid and they will need to be there for 25 years. They will live their long life on soil that may have underground risks or be at risk of being contaminated by human activity elsewhere and may also be subject to ever changing rules and regulations — some of them changing retroactively. There are so many parameters and you can never be a 100% sure that you have each and every one accounted for. According to statistics, when 1000 things can go wrong, it’s almost inevitable — even if you’ve done a good job by identifying the 999 — that one will need some attention.

Section five: evaluating projects, operational structure and stewardship

Chris: On to the next section, which is the investment industry in practice. How do you go about evaluating an opportunity, a project, that comes across your desk?

Giannis: When dealing with real hard assets, if it is a piece of land, it is a connection point.  You need to evaluate the time frame; you need to evaluate the risks; And you need to evaluate what lies ahead in order to turn the early-stage development project into a revenue generating asset. It’s not really science. It’s really about having the experience, asking the right questions and trying to be fair about how you measure the land asset. 

Operating assets are slightly easier to evaluate. There’s a lot of practical and operational data which you can dive into and figure out where things stand. You need to look at the arrangements around operating those assets, but I’d say the due diligence methodology is quite established in the sector and it varies only by specifics. This is where you need a little bit of experience because some cases are less common than others and you need to know what this really means for the future of the asset.

Chris: Can you tell us a little bit about the people in your operational structure and the various skill sets that you need to have on your team to make this process work?

Giannis: Our setup is fairly typical. For a hands-on financial investor — not a passive investor — it is typical to try to go into the risk stack and develop some capabilities to control those risks. We have development managers, construction managers and asset managers. Through them, we manage those different stages.

One thing that is, of course, very interesting is the transition of an asset through the different stages of development through to operations. We are quite fortunate in that we have people on our team who have been on both sides of the development. We have people who have straddled both the physical structure boundaries and the asset management boundaries. It’s a good thing to have a solid understanding of those transition stages in asset life. I’d say that’s quite important. 

And, of course, we are very humble in the sense that we know we don’t know everything. We know that we will need to rely on external advisors. There are multiple specialist topics where we don’t need to reinvent the wheel. We can take advice from external technical advisors and specialty advisers on certain things. It’s something that the industry has allocated correctly — how to optimize our sources. We’re not building the assets ourselves, so we don’t have technicians screwing in piles on the structures. What is more efficient is, again, to let specialists do that. 

Chris: How do you measure the different metrics when you’re assessing the risk and rewards? Is it purely financial or are there other considerations? For example, how much impact are you making or how much carbon you take out of the atmosphere?

Giannis: These are things that we measure mainly because it’s a symbiotic kind of existence. This asset will be there for 25 years. If we are imposing on people, people will know. Even if they don’t know before we start the cycle, they will find out. Increasingly, the industry is very conscious of how we’re dealing with a community surrounding the assets. You want to have good relations because you will be there for such a log time. This cannot be superficial. You can’t just do something and go. You will be there; the asset will be there. The SPV, whoever is funding it, will be there. You need to make sure that you treat the region, the place, the town, the municipality that is hosting you with respect.

That’s something we do and it is something we know we need to keep focusing on. In terms of the whether this is a criterion for investing — absolutely. You won’t go and invest in an asset that will be perceived as incompatible with the region. Even if you have all the licenses, you can be seen as a hostile alien landing on this community — so it is absolutely part of the assessment.

Chris: Is there any weight given to the environmental impacts in your considerations? For example, you have two sites, all things being equal except one is marginally less profitable than the other — but the one that’s less profitable has got a far greater impact on taking carbon out. Which one do you go for?

Giannis: We’re taking carbon out now based on the merit of the amount of solar energy we deploy — the more solar we deploy, the more carbon we take. I would say the imperative is to deploy as much alternative power as possible. And, without being almost an inevitability, the focus is on how our presence there works for the environment and for the local community.

We are finding there are lots of opportunities to do or try or study new things. We’ve had lots of discussions with environmental groups, academics and folks that say, ‘look, this is a fantastic opportunity. This piece of land will be undisturbed for many years.’ We can study how it recovers or we can we take other angles. This is an opportunity to improve not just the ground and the soil and the vegetation, but the fauna as well. We are bringing back animals, insects, etc. 

You don’t start by thinking, ‘what I can do to improve this land?’ but you realize there are so many things you can do. It’s almost a waste not to do that. There will be more and more of that coming our way. Solar, in particular, is so land intensive. It would really be a waste not to find ways of doing something good with the lots.

Chris: That is a very enlightened view of the responsibilities there. Do you think that your ability to think this way comes out of the additional freedoms you have because of your capital structure? It’s a family office. Is this view a result of individually motivated people there who want to take the overall good as a consideration? Or, is this something that is filtering down throughout the entire investment community?

Giannis: You will find that many of the people in the industry do have a genuine interest in community relations and in what you can do for the ground you’re occupying — especially those folks who are a little bit closer to the action. If you are a passive investor with a small, minority stake in already operating assets, you might put a little bit of due diligence into the community relations, tech thing. But if you are a little bit closer to the to the operations, to the construction activities and to the local communities, I find it’s almost impossible to ignore it. You literally have the opportunity to really do something good with very little. So why not do it?

Section six: energy storage and accessibility

Chris: If you go back to the famous old story of the gold rush in America, the only people who made money during the gold rush were the people who sold the picks or who sold the sandwiches for the people going up the mountains. Who are the pick makers or the sandwich makers who are making money in this transition?

Giannis: There are many examples of suppliers losing it all, simply because these big peaks and troughs. They can really wipe you out. I think here the focus should be on what is most valuable. In this case, it is the energy generation. The people who make money are those who are closest to the kilowatt hours of generation.

Chris: Although, any particular part of the world will have their technology of choice. Here, it’s likely to be solar.  In the North Sea, it’s going to be wind. When the wind goes on the North Sea, everybody’s value goes down. Here, when the sun goes, everybody’s solar value goes down. So being close to it implies that it’s the energy storage people, the guys who can hold onto it and can put it into the grid at a different time, who do better.

Giannis: That is a very good point. The storage still has some limitations. It’s only very short-term storage, but it is happening as we speak. Storage asset owners in the UK are making really, really good returns, balancing the market and offering ancillary services in that particular market. It’s definitely happening. Will it happen forever? No, because, again, the more storage you have, the less imbalance you have. In a way, it is the nature of our sector. The more storage capacity you have, the lower the price.

Chris: What does storage mean to you?  You seem to be talking about batteries.

Giannis: Yes, it is batteries for now — in the sense that this is the most readily available system out there. I think the next will be hydrogen and generating green hydrogen. Again, we will need to see how it will be consumed, but I think that’s coming next.

And then there is niche, or very specific cases of storing energy in any ways you can imagine. I have to admit, I’m not very close to any such creative projects that involve moving water between heights.

Chris: Those are good projects.

Giannis: They do make sense, but they are extremely specific.  I am a big fan of battery storage in the sense that, now, it’s so well engineered; it’s so easy to deploy and you don’t have the constraints you have from solar, for example. It’s much less energy intensive and you don’t need to follow the resources. It’s a little bit easier to deploy in that sense. I’ve had very good experiences deploying photovoltaic.

Chris: Batteries, as a technology, are fantastic and they’re improving all the time. The main problems I’m seeing with batteries, at the moment, are increasing costs, increasing scarcity and longer lead times. Everybody wants to do batteries. You’ve now got your eight-hour batteries appearing in in California. That’s a big step forward, but we’re still a long way away from the 100-hour batteries that we’re probably going to need.

Giannis: That’s absolutely true. I’m not sure how long it will take or what that will mean for supply chains — both in materials and, also, in moving the equipment around. But, some years ago waiting times were more expensive. People were thinking it was impossible to achieve the kind volumes we’ve now seen in the last few years.

Chris: So true, but solar is also getting more expensive.

Giannis: Indeed, but that’s energy. I think it’s all part of the of the transition. It needs to be managed because you can’t live without the energy. What you see all around the world is governments stepping in and trying to regulate that.

Chris: That’s an interesting comment: ‘you can’t live without energy.’ We’re from an extremely blessed generation. Ourselves, our parents, maybe our grandparents were the first generations in history that haven’t had to worry about energy. We’re sitting here thinking, oh, energy — it’s an absolute right!’  For thousands of years of human history, this was not the case. It was something that people were deeply concerned about.

Giannis: We are a little bit concerned now, but I think we’re on the cusp of reaching a point where energy will be generated anywhere and everywhere. Technology will close all these big questions around materials. There are so many ways to generate energy. Once you move away from the fossil fuels, look how absurd it seems to be moving fuels all around the world. The kind of infrastructure we need for the renewable energy transition is nothing compared to this insane infrastructure that we’ve been carrying with fossil fuels. 

Chris: True, but there are a lot of people with vested interests who wish to keep the status quo.

Giannis: There will be a moment in time where this will have enough momentum.

Chris: Let’s hope so! To get there, we will also need other mechanisms. Earlier I was asking you if you look at the carbon you are taking out. Do you see a future where carbon is going to be a cost, a liability, in Europe.

Giannis: Yes, we’re seeing this now. I’d say that the most motivated buyers out there are those that have the most off-setting to do. It is happening, even if the mechanism for how this will be achieved is not 100% clear, the writing is on the wall. Carbon is a liability and anything you can do to mitigate that is something you had better do.

Section seven: why choose this industry?

Chris: We just have a couple of questions that I always ask the interviewees. First, for all the people who are watching this, could you answer the question of why they should care about what you care about?  You’re clearly very passionate about the space you’re in — about being in renewables and, particularly, being in the finance part of it. Why should I or an LBS student looking for a future, or an investor decide to focus their time, their money, their careers in this space?

Giannis: I’d say it’s a very exciting sector — and not just for the professions you name. It is also exciting for people interested in general management, project management — for all sorts of schemes and backgrounds. It’s a very fast evolving sector — meaning that there are not a lot of people who have tons of experience. Therefore, you have a huge gap to bridge. It’s something where you can come in, learn and follow the flow of things. The stream of time ahead of you in this industry is long.  You can even switch into the sector a bit later in your career. I’ve seen people coming into the industry looking to prolong their careers. There are lots of things that fit well for people from different skill sets and from different moments in their careers, etc. 

You can transfer your skills. I had a procurement background in automotive. I came and started a career in renewables. People I know from L.B.S. and from elsewhere went into renewable energy finance — not coming from this particular asset focus — and they’ve done they’ve done very well. It is a growing sector, which gives new opportunities. It’s evolving. The changes make it interesting.

Chris: From a slightly different perspective, seeing as you’ve got an engineering background, why would engineers want to get involved in this as opposed to the information tech space — which everybody seems to be driven into at the moment?

Giannis: I won’t say that it’s the best sector to be in. What I will say is, because it is growing, because it is changing — changing in terms of technology, changing in terms of business models and all that — it means that you’ll get opportunities to transition. I’ve seen lots of engineers coming in and growing into general management positions. It’s something you can do in renewables. You accumulate the knowledge through projects. Then you find yourself managing multiple projects. Then you find yourself managing a team of project managers. It is not unlike tech, but I’d say renewables is as good as tech — that’s probably good enough.

Section eight: lessons from the Greek experience of the renewables transition

Chris: Last but not least, we’re here in Athens, a wonderful place that is making some strides towards the renewable transition — otherwise, you wouldn’t be sitting across the table from me right now. What lessons can be learned, for good or for bad, from the Greek experience of the renewables transition?

Giannis: Lots! Or very few — it depends how you look at it. I’d say Greece followed the typical early markets challenges. We had a policy that was running too hot. We then had to pull the handbrake. We didn’t kill the sector, but it suffered a lot. But this is where I’m saying that the irreversible transition makes the sector almost recession proof — even in Greece, even with a failed policy failure, even with a debt crisis, the industry is coming back. It’s coming back big time, simply because Greece needs to cut its reliance on lignite. Lignite is a poor type of coal that is really, really polluting the world with CO2 emissions and it is very inefficient. We have to move away from it to control our emissions and renewables are now so efficient in terms of costs and output. 

The switch has been dramatic. There have been peaks and troughs. There will be sustained growth for the next few years until we manage to close down those lignite factories. We have the classic policy errors we made but, I’d say, trust the power of the transition and it will come through — even for Greece.

Chris: In Portugal there was a very generous feed-in tariff that ended up being pulled because it was unaffordable during the financial crisis. It caused huge amounts of pain in the industry. Around 80% of the people involved in that industry went bust at the time. You also see similar mistakes, though not quite as dramatic, in the UK.  Onshore wind hasn’t been supported there for an awful lot of years and continues not to be supported despite lots of good reasons for supporting it. You say put your faith in the industry. Why is Greece then special? They seem to be putting faith into this transition whereas we’re not seeing, for example, any onshore wind being built in in the UK because of policies.

Giannis: Greece is not unique in any sense, but it has a few things going on. It has good sun and, also, the wind load factors are quite good. We have lots of mountains in the country which really provide a strong wind resource. Greece has these things going for it. There are also things that work against it. Greece is an archipelago — not all of it, but there are many hundreds of thousands of people living in remote areas and they need to be interconnected. So there needs to be some consideration for this. What I’d say Greece has in favour of renewables is that it has been relying on very CO2 intensive, dirty lignite-based energy generation, and it needs to find something that is clean and cheap. And, guess what? It will be wind and solar. 

Chris: Is that reflected in policies?  And how is that being promoted?

Giannis: It’s not reflected directly in the policy. I’d say it’s reflected in the outcomes — in the results. At the moment, the amount of solar and wind that is being built is really a lot. The number I’m giving you is probably not accurate, but around 1.5, 1.6 gigawatts a year of solar and wind energy are being produced — which is absolutely massive for a country like ours. when we were relying purely on fossil fuels, the installed capacity was 12, 14, 15 gigawatts of fossil fuel. So it is happening. Things are working. I can’t tell you everything is perfect. It’s not. But the market is delivering capacity. 

Chris: So it’s a triumph of capitalism over regulation of policy.

Giannis: Yes. If you are persistent enough and you are willing to ride certain things out, then yes.

Chris: This seems like a good place to leave it. Thanks very much! It was a fascinating conversation.

Giannis: Thank you. I absolutely loved it! 

 

 

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