Italian utility Enel targets Africa as growth market
Italian utility Enel plans huge investments in renewable energy and grids in Africa, where it expects to find the kind of growth it has enjoyed in Latin America.
Enel's chief executive officer Francesco Starace told Reuters that in five years Enel expects to have built up to 5,000 megawatts of renewable energy assets in Africa via its 69 percent owned Enel Green Power unit, which he headed until being appointed Enel CEO in May last year.
He said parent company Enel -- which has 96 gigawatts of net installed power capacity worldwide -- will also invest strongly in African power grids, which will probably make it Africa's second-biggest power group after state utility Eskom.
"For us, Africa is the next Latin America," Starace told Reuters at the Business and Climate Summit in Paris.
"In five years Latin America will no longer be emerging but emerged," he said, adding that Enel is the largest player across that region in conventional energy, renewables and distribution.
Enel is investing in renewable energy assets in energy-starved South Africa with a balance of 60 percent wind and 40 percent solar.
It also plans to spend heavily on wind, solar, geothermal and hydro energy in Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Mozambique and Ethiopia, while participating in a wind tender in Morocco.
Enel will hope to improve on the chequered record of African power projects where governments and utilities have often struggled to maintain new turbines, transformers and power lines.