IN COMES A BIGGIE

A Future With Wind
Elizabeth Olson, January 6, 2007 (NY Times)

- AES, the big power company, is branching out to wind power generation and other alternative energy. The company, which generates and distributes electricity in 26 countries, is also entering the $28 billion carbon trading market, where credits are exchanged to reduce or offset greenhouse gas emissions. Its chief executive, Paul Hanrahan, sat down in his office at the company’s sleek new headquarters in Arlington, Va., to discuss these developments…

- We saw that alternative energy was attractive from the environmental standpoint and from the energy security standpoint. And it is really the area with the highest growth potential. The wind industry is expected to triple in size by 2015, so it’s going from about 73 gigawatts to over 200 gigawatts…
- We are in 26 countries, and by buying a company in a region we can take that skill set the company has and expand it globally…we bought a U.S. wind company, and we’re developing U.S. wind projects as well as expanding into countries like Bulgaria, Scotland and France. And we’re looking at new projects in India, China and the Czech Republic…
- AES has had record revenue recently — a 14 percent increase to $3.15 billion in the third quarter…We are one of the few global power companies that not only is operating in developed countries but also in emerging markets, which, with respect to electricity, have much higher growth rates…it allows us as a company to grow much faster…
- We have dramatically reduced the amount of debt, and in various locations we’ve refinanced dollar debt with local currency debt so we don’t have that same kind of foreign currency exposure…

- We have three [liquefied natural gas] terminals in development right now. The U.S. is running out of natural gas — production is declining and demand growing — so the expectation is that the import levels will go from 3 percent today to about 24 percent in 2020…
- We developed…a way to mitigate carbon emissions from our plants…in the early ’90s. For example, for our power plant in Connecticut, we planted 50 million trees in Guatemala. This new effort is a continuation of that theme, but looking at it now not as a social responsibility project but as something that has profit potential given that people are buying these credits in Europe and are likely to continue buying them…
- For countries with coal as an indigenous resource, [AES clean technology] has a lot of potential because you can do a lot to reduce the particulate emissions and the sulfur nitrogen emissions which cause acid rain. You can reduce the carbon emissions from a power plant very cheaply, so we think there is a lot of potential to produce electricity in an environmentally responsible way…