Future belongs to green energy, says Sberbank's CEO

By Murat Temizer and Emre Gurkan Abay

MOSCOW (AA) - With the explosion in renewable investments over the past few years, private oil and gas companies are expanding their portfolios and transforming into "energy" companies, the CEO of Russia's Sberbank said on Friday.

"No one could imagine five years ago that the price of renewable energy would fall at such a rate in the Russian capital Moscow," CEO Herman Gref said.

He explained with the competitive pricing of solar energy, private oil and gas companies have started to turn to renewables.

"The future belongs to green energy. Solar energy looked very expensive a while ago but now it is in competition with conventional energy in terms of pricing," Gref stressed.

The CEO predicted that in the next five years a reduction in the cost of solar energy by 27 percent would be realized while hydrocarbons continue to lose investments worldwide.

"All key international investors plan to reduce investments in conventional sources or they have already done that. There are serious changes in the energy sector," he said, adding that, "Everybody is reducing investments in conventional energy. So far not all investors have realized the full potential of the renewables market, but they will."

Russian electricity company Rosseti's general director, Pavel Livinsky, also spoke on the same panel at the Russian Energy Week forum, and claimed that by 2030 a third of consumers will choose renewable energy sources.

The Russian Energy Week forum, in which Anadolu Agency is a media partner, runs from Oct. 3 to 7 in Moscow and serves as a platform for discussion of the main challenges faced by the energy sector.