SPEEDING UP GREEN ENERGY

THE head of Acciona’s local energy division says the renewable energy heavyweight is eyeing up to $2 billion in new investment in Australia by 2025.

And while Brett Wickham is hopeful the federal government’s latest energy policy will produce a truce in the energy wars, a decade of political upheaval on the issue has not blunted the Spanish company’s enthusiasm to do business here.

“Business continues — we develop, we build, we own, we operate,” Mr Wickham said yesterday.

“I’m not just here to construct projects and then flip them to a super fund.

“If I can’t build projects for a while because the market is a bit tight and I can’t quite get them across the line, we will sit here and operate our projects until things start to move. But we are seeing a lot more appetite now.”

Mr Wickham, a former Royal Australian Navy engineer, took over as the managing director of Acciona’s Australian energy division in November.

The group is the biggest green utility in the world.