Taqa’s Saif Al Sayari
Taqa, the Abu Dhabi national energy company, has set up a division to invest in renewables, and will take part in Morocco’s upcoming tenders for wind and solar.
Saif Al Sayari, head of the new Energy Solutions division, tells Recharge the unit will invest in wind, solar, geothermal, waste-to-energy and hydropower, as well as “unconventional” fossil-fuel projects such as shale gas and using CO2 for enhanced oil and gas recovery.
Taqa Power is the world’s sixth-largest independent utility. Al Sayari says Energy Solutions will become a third “vertical” for the company, run alongside oil and gas, water and power.
Energy Solutions will look to invest in the ten countries where Taqa already has a presence, primarily India, the Middle East and Africa, but also the UK and the Netherlands.
Taqa, which already has a power division in Morocco, is part of a consortium that will bid for a 150MW wind farm in the country within the next few weeks. It will also bid for a 165MW concentrating solar power project, and will consider bidding for one of the five wind farms totalling 850MW for which the government invited tenders last month.
“We are still starting up,” Al Sayari says. “We are in a phase of screening many projects — in hydro, in wind, in solar. We’d like to get to a point where we have more than a few that we will seek board approval for in 2012.”
The new unit has begun a feasibility study into an energy-from-waste project in Abu Dhabi, to reduce the emirate’s burgeoning landfill problem and help meet its growing electricity needs.
“We are assessing the type of waste to see how much power we can get out of it and which technology we should use,” Al Sayari adds. The project is thought to have the potential to generate up to 150MW, and could be operating in four years.
Al Sayari says Taqa has been looking at investing in renewables for some time, but the returns have not previously stacked up well against its hydrocarbon and power businesses. “That’s why Energy Solutions was created,” he explains. “We want to see these projects analysed in the right way, so you are comparing apples with apples.”
Many renewables technologies are approaching grid parity, he says, making them a more attractive proposition.
