The founder of wind energy company Airtricity, sold last year for 1.9 billion Euros ($2.98 billion), wants to raise 300 million Euros to fund a new company Mainstream Renewable Power, he said on Tuesday.
The new Dublin-based company will develop wind, concentrated solar power and marine power projects, and aims to sell some resulting income to investment funds looking for annual 7 percent returns and keep expected profits above that for itself.
Chief Executive Eddie O'Connor has ploughed most of his fortune from the recent sale into the new company and rejected criticism that renewable energy is too costly or that capacity bottlenecks made ambitious targets unachievable.
"It is realistic," O'Connor said of UK targets announced two weeks ago to get about one third of its electricity from renewable sources by 2020, compared to less than 5 percent now.
Environmental groups welcomed the government's latest green energy push, including a 10-fold increase in wind. But some analysts said there was not enough capacity to make the 7,000 extra wind turbines and that they would need coal or gas plants to back them up because wind is an unreliable energy supply.
Britain's Royal Academy of Engineering said the target had hugely underestimated engineering and investment challenges. Just three companies manufacture offshore wind turbines, which would account for about half the UK wind target.
O'Connor said a "supergrid" could overcome the variability of wind, linking turbines from Ireland in the west to the Baltic in north-east Europe as well as Britain, Denmark and Germany.
"The bigger the grids the better," he said, adding that local opposition to electricity pylons carrying wind-powered electricity from windy west Scotland to more densely populated England could be overcome using a marine route.
Widespread adoption over the next decade of electric cars charged off the grid would help resolve the problem of how to store available wind energy until it was needed, he added.
Royal Dutch Shell said in May that it planned to sell its stake in one of the world's largest planned wind farms, at the mouth of London's Thames estuary, citing rising capital costs and inadequate UK financial support.
"UK support is good enough to build offshore wind if you've got the will to do it," O'Connor said.
Wind turbine prices have risen 50 percent over the past five years but wholesale power prices have more than doubled, following oil and coal price rises, meaning wind power could now compete with natural gas, O'Connor said.
O'Connor has invested 30 million euros in Mainstream Renewable Power from an approximate 50-million euro fortune he made from the sale of Airtricity to E.ON and Scottish & Southern Energy PLC.
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