Mrs. Lueck you are responsible for the business development in Western and Southern Europe. What was your motivation to work for GreenEnergyWorld? 

I have been travelling a lot during my studies. I studied French, Spanish, and English alongside with economics. A major part was to get familiar with the francophone culture. For this reason I have been living and studying in Canada and France most of this time. After a longer stay in Argentina at the end of my studies I started looking for an international company. At that time GreenEnergyWorld expanded its business to the French and Spanish market. It was basically coincidence when I found GreenEnergyWorld, which was at the same time looking for somebody who could cover their business development in the French and Spanish Market.

Why are you interested in renewable energies?

Being interested in the renewables began on a stay in Quebec during my studies. I was impressed by their energy supply system, which puts a strong focus on renewable energy resources. In contrast Quebec?s former mother country France gains 80% of its energy out of nuclear power. From this point of view I was interested to support the increase of renewable energies in France even though indirectly.

Why are France and Spain of particular interest for GreenEnergyWorld?

The wind energy sector in France has been increased steadily over the last years after reasonable legal requirements for wind energy projects of any size became law. Attractive yields on wind project investments over 15 years are guaranteed through an assured feed-in-tariff-system. France has been pushed at the fourth position in Europe of both total installed wind capacity and annual growth of wind power, despite a massive nuclear lobby and activists of anti-wind-energy who basically try to stop new wind energy projects. There are currently 3.400 MW installed wind capacity. According to the EU climate targets agreed between all European member-countries, in France 25.000 MW of wind energy has to be installed by 2020. Facing this target there will be much potential for GreenEnergyWorld activities. Not only France but Spain is moving forward rapidly. The country was the strongest growing wind European market in 2008. As Spain used to be dominated by domestic wind energy investors, there is nowadays a growing interest of foreign investors for Spanish wind projects. 

How does your project acquisition look like? 

At the beginning we get in contact directly with the project developer or the other way around. If there is a certain interest of finding an investor or buyer for a concrete project there will be signed a contract between GreenEnergyWorld and the developer. After confirmation GreenEnergyWorld prepares every step for trading the project. This stage includes mainly the date processing but also creating and designing the offers or exposes. At the second stage GreenEnergyWorld gets in contact with a pre-selected amount of investors, their requirements fulfil the conditions of the project. Besides the original project marketing, requests from project developers and investors have been diversifying the research of identifying cooperation partners like for Co-developments or Joint Ventures.

In Spain we are still exploring the market. Meanwhile we already signed first contracts including excellent projects. From this point of view we except clearly Spain to our next focus market.

How strong would you consider the competition for GreenEnergyWorld in France and Spain? 

In Spanien hingegen finden wir eine sehr aktive nationale Vermittlerbranche vor. Hier sind wir diverse Kooperationen versuchsweise eingegangen. Wir mussten aber feststellen, dass sich unsere Arbeitsweise zu reinen Kontaktvermittlern zum Teil erheblich unterscheidet und eher schwierig gestaltet. Der Wettbewerb in Spanien ist sehr groß in Bezug auf die Anzahl der Wettbewerber im Markt, nicht so sehr aber bezogen auf die Qualität der Leistungen durch die Akteure. Daher sehe ich hier sehr gute Chancen für uns.

In France does not exist a considerable market of brokers. Only a few companies offer the same service as GreenEnergyWorld does. In fact companies which develop and operate wind projects are more likely connected between each other. Even in the last years a number of project developers have been bought by groups like GDZ/Suez or EDF.

However - Spain has a very active market of national brokers. Here we have been trying to get Co-operations. Unfortunately we have considered our service to be much more different in compare with the activities of pure domestic brokers, which made a Co-operation unlikely to be working. The competition in Spain is high regarding the amount of competitors at the market but not as much concerning the service quality of each player. For this reason I am expecting good opportunities for us.