Austria-based Enery acquires, develops, builds, and operates renewable energy plants throughout Central and Eastern Europe. It has a 312 MW operational portfolio spread across 59 sites in six countries. Severin Vartigov is Chief commercial officer at Enery.
Mr. Vartigov, Enery has been one of the most active renewable companies in the PPA market, which is definitely heating up in Southeast Europe. Tell us a bit more about your experience here and especially with regards to cross-border PPAs.
We have managed to sign more than 10 PPAs with credible partners for the last 18 months. Our main goal is to structure the agreements in accordance with the needs of our partners, so we dedicate significant time and efforts in understanding their needs and address them in the best possible way by choosing the right generation mix (in case of a multi technology PPA), propose different delivery profiles, risk allocations, etc.
We believe that we are creating long-term relationships with our counterparts and the PPA was just the beginning of a long term mutually beneficial relationship. In many cases, we started discussions over a local PPA in one country but ended up with a few deals covering different markets. We also managed to build capabilities to offer building of onsite projects, wholesale power trade, balancing and market access services for external renewable and storage assets which gives us an edge in designing the best product covering the specific needs of the consumers.
Cross-border PPAs are gaining popularity due to the constantly increasing regional market correlation and price convergence. We, at Enery, believe that the European market integration will only strengthen in the years to come, and the cross-border deals will become the preferred PPA option for developers with less liquid.
Apart from PPAs, more and more industry companies are choosing to build PV parks to cover their own consumption needs. Since Enery has expertise in the building and development of such projects, does the company offer services in that area?
We are very active in this space and managed to secure the construction of a few onsite projects (rooftops and on adjacent land plots to industrial facilities) for our partners. This is a business line we started developing two years ago and these projects are led by the EIP (Enery Industry Partnership) team.
Clearly, the onsite projects have material advantages due to the grid fees’ savings and the utilisation of rooftop areas and land plots that were not used by the facility owners for other business activities.
Same with the PPAs, Enery dedicates significant time in providing an optimised project design given the site specifics, available generation potential and consumers’ needs to come up with the best possible solutions.
What other services are part of the company’s portfolio?
Our portfolio of services is constantly evolving to accommodate the needs of our customers. Along with providing PPAs from our greenfield pipeline, developing and constructing onsite projects, we are actively supporting our partners with wholesale power trade, supply of power, generation and demand forecasting, and daily optimization to reduce the constantly increasing balancing costs. The latter is performed by Enery Portfolio Optimization (EPO) which is now an active balancing responsible party in two countries with clear vision to expand in all markets we operate in. Through EPO, we are not only supporting the end consumers with additional green power supply and smart consumption services but also collaborating with other renewable producers and storage asset owners to attain key synergies in the volatile power markets in the EU.