The covid is becoming a pretty good excuse, says Solek founder Zdeněk Sobotka

Your main business is in Latin America, in Chile you also have an office with dozens of people. You wanted to move there with your family at the beginning of the year. How did the covid get involved?

A lot, we didn’t move. They have also gone through a pandemic in Chile, and only now is everything opening up there. In principle, the business did not affect it at all, it is more difficult to expand to new places due to limited travel opportunities. We have a stable office there, seventy people, we all know each other and we don’t have to visit every month, but now my colleagues and I are going there and we will be quarantined for two weeks. It’s no longer a one-week trip. But now it is enough to have a negative test 3 days before departure. Covid helped Paradid a little economically economically because the previous massive demonstrations were over. They are trying to support foreign investors there, for example now they are giving exemption from the tax on foreign credit, VAT will also be returned more quickly. Our advantage is that electricity will still be needed.

How is the recruitment of new colleagues for the Chilean office now, where you have people from all over Latin America, because of the covid?

It’s more complicated. When it’s Chilan, it’s fine, now the border with Argentina has opened, so it will work. However, we were supposed to accept the Brazilians, and it didn’t work out, the government banned it. Unfortunately, we will have to get used to that life with a pandemic. It is already clear that it will not be one wave and enough.

Has political risk changed in Chile?

It would be a risk for us if politicians stopped supporting renewables. For a while, we feared that they would say that renewables were expensive, and for a while they would not support them, that it would freeze. But the opposite happened. I see this in the case of private funds, which have begun to reflect in their strategies the obligation to have some share of net resources in the portfolio. In fact, they are forced to do so by those who save money for them. No matter what politicians say, people want to live somewhere that will be nice in the future. They see what catastrophes are happening in the world, and they do not want to contribute to it. Smart electricity generation will continue to expand, for example solar and wind energy is something quite common today. The eternal energy of the sun is certainly the right and promising way to achieve global sustainability. New challenges are coming.

Which for example?

For us, it’s hydrogen. It will totally change the energy matrix, because storage will finally be solved. And it will benefit not from oil wells, but from the sun and wind. This will start to happen relatively quickly and large consumption, such as trains, ships but also cars, will start to use hydrogen as soon as possible. We are slowly looking at it and we want to gradually focus the company in this direction.

Do you already have something specific planned for hydrogen?

We are starting negotiations with the Chilean state oil company Enap, which would like to consume green hydrogen, and we have a project of an 80-megawatt power plant not far from them. We offer them to supply this electricity for the production of hydrogen. It’s nothing big, but it would be a reference project for us. It is true that we are by no means the first in Chile with hydrogen. Porsche, for example, is very active there, producing hydrogen from windmill electricity in the south and transporting it to Germany. There are other interesting projects:

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