You are engaged in the most powerful and dynamic markets for PV in Europe. How can you manage to keep on riding the wave?
We are active in several very prominent markets in Europe. Obviously one can think about the Polish market. There we have a PV pipeline of close to one gigawatt. We entered Poland 14 years ago, the group is 26 years old. 20 years ago, we entered France, and in France we are among the big players. We also have a pipeline in Italy, which is super interesting. Italy badly needs to substitute Russian gas. The prices are very high, obviously the country is very sunny and we also have a strong team throughout Italy. I could name Greece, I could name Spain and Germany, which are also very thirsty for solar electricity.
How do you secure enough land for the solar boom which is coming now?
That's our secret, but that's obviously the challenge. I would say that you have two ways usually to do that. You have the systematic map where you map the constraint, etc. And then you have the contacts because at the end it's a people business. Especially in photovoltaics there are a lot of contacts you have during a trade fair or through your network. That's the way you progressively build up your pipeline.
VSB originally started with wind projects. How can you use your contacts in the solar business?
We all know we need to bring them both together because there is no miracle energy in the field. We are developing a big park in Poland, a large partnership with 170 megawatts made up of 100 megawatts of wind and 70 megawatts of solar power. It will be a hybrid system. The two power plants will feed their energy into the same grid. Doing so, you spare the raw material. It is a topic in terms of sustainability. Doing so, you offset some costs, you lower the cost of energy. This hybrid park is very powerful.
Would you say that hybrid is the future?
To a large extent. Although we have to be careful because you cannot always have wind and solar power in the same place. We can put wind turbines in the forest, where you cannot put PV. I was in Italy the other day, where I have seen panels upside down because they went below the base of turbines where it's extremely windy. And obviously we have to think of storage. We also have a project with a storage unit, which is obviously important because we know that solar will need to be stored somewhere at the end of the day. That's a challenge if we want to hit the 100% renewable. (TW/HS/mfo)
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