My name is Earl

Earl recalls: ‘On a trip back from Kazakhstan, Colin turned to me and said, “Look, these guys don’t just want advisers, they want partners, so let’s start up ourselves and act as the principals.” It was then that we decided to set up IPC.’ The venture saw them acting as principals in the privatisation of electricity companies in emerging markets. The duo were far more able to get things done than traditional investors, who failed to understand the risks involved in power projects during the rush to privatise the electricity industry in the early 1990s.

In the beginning, the strategy was to team up with US domestic power companies that had yet to invest overseas, in order to attack emerging markets and use Earl’s and Moynihan’s connections to leverage a position in international power privatisations and buyouts. During the late ’90s, IPC snared partnerships with the likes of Houston-headquartered New Century Energy, and Phillips Petroleum, and became a developer of new-build power plants in its own right.

Earl has gone on to buy out both Moynihan and the American backers from IPC, which has established a track record on four continents as both a developer and an operator of power plants. Its technical capabilities have proven fundamental to the winning of electricity privatisation tenders and concessions to build new plants, because regulators allow only the most technically proficient operators to manage power plants for reasons of national security, economic reliability and health and safety.

Today, on its own and through AIM-quoted associate companies, IPC is working on more than 2,500 megawatts of gas-fired development projects, 400 megawatts of coal-fired combined heat and power projects, and 150 megawatts of ‘combined cycle’ upgrade projects. Rather impressively, it also manages gas-fired power plant capacity for global oil giant BP in Latin America.

Power to the people
Earl’s efforts are now focused on IPC, and its two spin-off AIM ventures. When he took South American electrification specialist Rurelec to market in 2004, ‘it was the first utility to list on AIM,’ he remembers, ‘and we were also early adopters of IFRS, because we are truly an international business.’

Earl adds: ‘Originally, we were about managing rural electrification contracts – we started off in Bolivia, then moved into Argentina – but we have since widened the brief. Rurelec controls four major power plants in Argentina as well as Bolivia, and is running the rule over Chile and Peru with the aim of becoming ‘the leading rural power company in the southern cone of Latin America.’

He says: ‘We are the largest British power generator in Latin America, and by the end of this year we’ll have 40 per cent of the Bolivian market. Oh, and all the projects that we do are very green,’ he adds with a smile. ‘Argentina is growing at nine per cent and Bolivia at almost six per cent,’ says Earl, ‘and both governments want us to accelerate our expansion plans for new power capacity,’ to sate rapidly spiralling power needs.

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