We catch up with Ingmar Wilhelm, co-founder and CEO of developer and IPP Galileo, after the firm commissioned its first own-operate renewable energy project.
Galileo is a pan-European clean energy project developer, which has primarily been active in solar to-date and also largely been a conventional sell-at-shovel-ready development play.
It is now transitioning to becoming an independent power producer (IPP), financing, owning and operating projects it has developed in-house. That has kicked off with a small, 3MW solar PV plant in Lombardy, Italy, commissioned last month. The transition is partially just a consequence of the time passed since being founded in 2021.
“The plan always included either selling or financing our projects once they got to a certain maturity, but you need to sell a few projects to get a real understanding of their value, by seeing them from another company’s perspective,” Wilhelm says.
However, there is also a wider industry trend of early-stage project development becoming less lucrative and therefore more of the value (i.e. money to be made) in owning and operating projects yourself. This is the case in all mature renewable energy markets.
