During his participation in the Future Energy Summit Iberia 2025, Álvaro Pérez de Lema de la Mata, CEO of Saeta Yield, reaffirmed the company’s new strategic positioning as the spearhead of a European renewable industrial platform based on the Iberian Peninsula. 

He explained that the backing of Masdar, a UAE public group, allows the company to make decisions with investment horizons of 20 to 30 years, facilitating structural, sustained growth aligned with Europe’s energy transition.

With this support, Saeta Yield is rolling out a new portfolio of hybrid projects, integrating solar and storage at the core. 

“We are convinced that solar plus storage makes sense; it can add value and solve the integration challenge,” he stated. In this context, he revealed that the company is already working on the development of new assets with this configuration.

The plan includes repowering a plant in Portugal and investing in up to 400 MW of hybrid capacity, including projects that incorporate batteries to maximise flexible energy management. 

Pérez de Lema emphasised that these projects respond not only to the need to generate, but also to the challenge of efficiently integrating resources into the system, which requires planning aligned with grid and demand.

He also announced that the company is progressing with bilateral agreements with large industrial consumers, a strategy aimed at aligning generation with demand under long-term contracts. 

This approach would help avoid the volatility of the spot market and strengthen the economic viability of renewable assets in a fluctuating price environment.

The CEO was critical of the lack of regulatory visibility, especially concerning storage. “The regulator is once again arriving late,” he warned, and criticised that the current regulations are evolving “haphazardly”, hindering key investment decisions needed to develop the system. 

In his view, there is an urgent need to reform market rules to compensate storage services, such as arbitrage, surplus management or grid support.

With operations in Spain and Portugal, Saeta Yield currently manages 745 MW of installed capacity, with 539 MW of wind and 49 MW of solar in Spain, and 144 MW of wind in Portugal, according to official data. This operational base is the foundation for a broader expansion aligned with Masdar’s goal of reaching 100 GW of installed renewables by 2030.

Beyond the megawatts, Saeta’s plan rests on a structural vision: the construction of an autonomous and permanent European energy industry. 

Pérez de Lema stressed that “we need to build a European industry with a vocation for permanence,” with local supply chains, home-grown technology and the capacity to compete globally.

He concluded that the current challenges cannot be addressed simply by adding more generation. A new regulatory architecture is required—one that values strategic services, promotes hybridisation and ensures stable conditions for long-term investment. 

“We need to redefine the rules of the game; we cannot continue operating under the previous model,” he cautioned.

Replay the full panel