Galp eyes US renewables market

Galp Energia, a Portuguese oil and gas company, has plans to penetrate the renewable energy market in the United States.

The company led by Andy Brown, who addressed members of the American Chamber of Commerce in Portugal (AmCham) yesterday on its ambitions and plans to go green, sees “enormous potential” in the US market, especially now that the White House administration is determined to invest in alternative energy sources as outlined by President Joe Biden at the COP 26 climate change conference in Glasgow this week.
At Web Summit on Wednesday, Galp announced that it would wrap up oil prospecting and research at new gas and oil fields from 2022 and stressed that by 2030 the goal was to reduce absolute carbon emissions from its operations by 40%.
In June, on ‘Capital Markets Day’, the company said it intended to allocate around 50% of its annual net investment of between €800 million to €1Bn in renewables with a diversification in both technology and geography.
In an interview with Lusa during Web Summit, Brown said there were three regions in which he was particularly interested – Europe, Latin America and the US and the company would “look at these in turn”.
Galp is a leader in solar energy on the Iberian peninsula after having in September concluded the setting up of a joint venture with the Spanish company ACS to develop a portfolio of projects in Spain with a total energy generation capacity of 2.9 GW. This commitment was boosted in August by the purchase of solar panel projects with 220 MW capacity in Spain.
In October, the company announced that it would enter the renewables market in Brazil with two solar projects with a 594MWp capacity — one in the state of Bahia (282 MWp) and the other in Rio Grande do Norte (312 MWp).
“We are clearly on the Iberian peninsula and we’re looking at other European countries that could be interesting. In Latin America we’re in Brazil and we’re looking at other countries in the region,” Andy Brown told Lusa.