Interview with Nadim Chaudhry posted yesterday on cleanenergymag.news
-Has Airec met the expectations you had?
-Airec has surpassed our expectations. It first came up in discussions in New York in April 2015, with Nicolas Eliaschev telling us that we had to make an event in Argentina. I wasn’t very positive at the time because to tell you the truth, I’ve been waiting for Argentina to solve out it’s problems for a long time. But he insisted telling me about Macri and the changes to come. I told him that my events are about attracting foreign capital and linking foreign investment and expertise with domestic companies, so there has to be an appetite for people to invest in Argentina for my events and format to work. As it turned out, I was wrong, and Nicolas was right.
Actually, the night Macri won I sent him an email telling him that we should work on this, and the next day my team and I started researching into Argentina, and building up some thoughts about when it would be the right time to make the event. And now it seems to be the right time.
-Tell me about Green Power, and the team you lead.
-We have a great team, we’ve been doing specifically renewable energy events since 2003. There wasn’t a lot happening back then, but as costs started to come down (solar energy has seen an 80% decrease in 8 years, wind is 50% down in a similar time frame), we have arrived to a point at which renewable energies are deeply disruptive to the existing energy system. So it’s been an incredible 13 years in the energy markets, and I think that we are about to enter a period of tremendous change.
The other thing that is happening all over the world is that every country has this challenges, which create opportunities, because in the end it is all about building an energy system that costs less, so we can have cheaper energy. And obviously the huge benefit is that the new systems are going to be emissions-free, both in terms of greenhouse gases and also in the linkage with transports, as we are going to see the flip from oil to electricity and the rise of electric vehicles.
A lot is happening, and there are huge opportunities around. Within that, we can see that the other trend is digitalization, which gives you greater efficiency compared to analog systems. We are talking about digital smart grids, linked to variable renewable energy power generation. Also within that, there’s a tendency to move from centralization to decentralization, which changes business models. We have seen it in other industries: when you have a real disruptive technology change, you have to adapt the business model. Business models have to change, and in the energy market we are entering that period of transition where we have to move from centralized systems to decentralized ones.
-Also, big companies are changing their ways and now aim to become energy providers as well.
-Big companies, in terms of corporates and industrialists, are looking at self-generation as part of the decentralization of the system. There are opportunities for them to have their own energy. Major consumers like Ikea, Google and Apple are big investors in renewable energy, increasingly looking at this table. Lower energy costs are a bonus for a business that’s planning long term and doesn’t want to deal with the fluctuations of having fossil fuels in their supply chain, which makes them become big players in the renewable energy. Again, there’s a linkage with electric vehicles, and you can see huge interest from the lights of Googles and Apples in that space. Whether they’ll be successful is another question. There still probably are gonna be car companies interested in this market. For example, Volkswagen has invested 2 billion dollars in electric vehicles and infrastructure, and they have unprecedented experience in the car sector.
-Tell me about you, how did you get involved in the renewable energy world?
-I spent 9 years working in mobile technology events, from 1994 to 2003, and I saw all the impact of dramatic technology change of mobile phones, but also the invention of the internet, fibre optics, and a whole host of telecommunications technologies that would deploy very quickly and have tremendous impacts. I am always interested in new technology, so around 2002 I started researching and getting interested in renewable energy, and about the potential for the environmental impact. I knew that there would be dramatic technological change, because as humans we are always innovating and creating better platforms, and also I knew that we could evolve and create new technologies which wouldn’t harm the planet, and that we can and have to live within the boundaries of living in one planet. There has to be a way in which you can manage that, but also you have to harness the powerful forces of capitalism. So when I started in 2003 with renewable energy events, renewables were seen very much as a left wing issue, and it was thought that it was only through control and left wing policies that you could protect the environment, whereas I saw the opportunity to harness business and create businesses that were incentivised to create clean products, and clean systems. It’s up to governments to draw the boundaries and create the market, but there’s not a reason why we can’t have markets of clean products and encourage innovation and personal risk in entrepreneurs.
Yes, politicians can construct markets, but they are always under the influence of the electorate, so you have to create the right environment and encourage people to take risks, and allow them to be able to get the rewards from those risks.
-Change comes with an emotion, with a desire to change, and it seems like that’s what you have done.
-Yes. We try to create platforms that encourage change, that accelerate project development, that spread best practices, that help derisk the markets. We understand that we need to get equity investors involved, that they need to meet the developers that are taking the risks, and once you got those two partners then you need to educate the banks. Here in Argentina, right now the next step is to educate the local banks to understand what debt finance is, what energy finance is. Then when you got the risk takers, and they’ve got the money, then they can deploy and buy the services and products that are required to create the projects. It’s about derisking the market, about understanding the details of what it takes for a market to function, and connecting those people so that they’re able to make informed business decisions so that we don’t have bad projects or low quality systems. This projects are designed for 20 years ahead, so it’s important that they work. When a market is starting in a place like Argentina, it is very important that it does well, that it doesn’t get a bad reputation because it is the birth of something new, and reputation is everything.
-Are you planning an event for next year?
Yes, we are very committed with Argentina in the long term, in connecting the market and accelerating the changes. Everything will have its time, but we are very interested in helping Argentina develope the new energy system. We intend this event to become the annual meeting point for Argentina’s energy industry. We are here to help create an event where people can do 3 or 4 month work in a short space of time, meet a huge array of people and make the right connections.