Antonio Sieira

IGNIS Energí­a, founded in 2015, works in the areas of development, generation, energy services, operation, and maintenance, with more than 20GW under development in Spain and abroad. How has IGNIS evolved over its six-year history?

The company was founded in March 2015 with an integrated management vision of the energy business and a goal to provide energy competitively to all consumers. We aim to foster integrated management of energy at every stage of the value chain. This includes the project design, including the engineering, purchasing, and monitoring process of the construction; the implementation; and the launch of certain technology-immersed facilities. We are currently managing 4% of Spain’s total energy produced, through a multi-technology platform that comprises hydropower plants, wind farms, PV solar parks, cogeneration, and so on. Furthermore, we manage this power across every electricity market, both in the daily market and realtime markets, in which Ignis is the leading independent platform. Ignis’ mission is to leverage in that expertise and expand this capabilities in other markets. Ignis operates 1GW of assets through 25year O&M contracts and is one of the few companies with expertise in utility scale solar parks, as it operates the 800MW Aragón Solar project, the largest photovoltaic plant in Europe since November 2019. This experience is allowing us to develop technology to operate future parks in order to, for example, increase productivity, reduce the failure rate, improve the performance ratio, and so on. One further activity being implemented by Ignis is the comprehensive design of the plant from scratch, which involves the entire organization. This integral vision offers us a huge competitive advantage and allows us to provide solutions adapted to market conditions and the specific requirements of the customer. As a consequence of the project in Aragón, we started developing what is currently the largest portfolio of renewable in Spain under development. We are leaders in promoting renewable energy in Spain, namely solar photovoltaic energy.

Recently, the government approved the Climate Change and Energy Transition Law to help Spain comply with its international commitments in the fight against climate change to achieve so-called “climate neutrality“ before 2050. What is your view on this?

It is a legislative development that allows for the implementation of more renewable plants, which makes economic sense, not only environmental sense. Spain has the best wind and solar power resources in Europe. As a country, we are confident we will be able to retain and attract energy-intensive industry, maintain those that we already have, and apply shifts to the usage of such energy. We can, therefore, make our industry more competitive and our houses greener, by modifying infrastructures. Hence, we will have achieved the transformation of the sector without the need for any subsidies, and we will promote national and foreign investments, creating jobs and much more.

What are Ignis’ priorities for the year ahead and for 2022?

For the year ahead, we essentially target reaching ready-to-build status in a significant part of the portfolio of renewable energy projects and mature our strategy in the above mentioned international markets. For example, we are planning the construction of a 90MW wind farm in California. This means we can get our foot in the door and start thinking about gas, marketing, management of energy, trading, and more, in the US. Our objective is to set up small projects in different places in order to determine the ones that are the most profitable in order to make an investment. We would also like to develop our own technology of components in the future. Where it may not a short-term project, Ignis is a product manufacturer, and we are already present in the R&D of products and processes. In fact, we are already active and developing new projects with hydrogen and in the asset management sector.