Over the past 25 years, AES has helped drive energy sector growth and pioneered advances in many markets, generating global industry leadership from innovation and operational excellence.
In our first 25 years, AES has become a global industry leader. We’ve helped transform communities worldwide through the generation and distribution of electricity. At the forefront of deregulation in the US and then privatization in markets around the world, today we retain our entrepreneurial spirit and proven ability to succeed wherever opportunities arise.
Founded in 1981, AES built its first power plant in 1985 in Texas, which was also one of the first competitive power plants in the United States. During AES’s first five years, we added an additional three plants in three states in the US, and began looking for opportunities to take our financing, construction and operational know-how global.
In the early 1990’s, as markets opened up globally, AES began generating electricity in the United Kingdom, soon followed by Argentina, Pakistan, China, Hungary, Brazil and other emerging markets worldwide. An early mover, in 1998 we acquired a minority stake in a power plant in the first and only generation privatization in India. In West Africa and Central America, we have brought electricity to places that never knew reliable power, while electrifying urban centers, including São Paulo and Indianapolis. We have helped pioneer new pollution control technologies in the US and biomass conversions in Hungary. And we have continued to expand into burgeoning markets worldwide—to Qatar, Oman, Sri Lanka, Cameroon—and more recently to Bulgaria, where we are building our single largest greenfield project investment to date, and the first large scale plant to be built in that country in 20 years.
Today, we are expanding into new lines of business—like wind, climate change and other alternative energy areas—while growing our core electricity business through platform expansions and by continuing to enter new markets, such as southeast Europe. Following the acquisition of significant wind generation assets in the US, we finalized the construction of our first wind farm in Texas in 2006, the same state in which twenty years before we constructed our first power plant. Since then, we have expanded our wind business into the UK, France and Bulgaria—some of the fastest growing markets for wind generation in Europe. Today, we have more than 3,000 MW of wind generation projects in development worldwide.
In 2006, we made a significant investment in a greenhouse gas emission offset project, AES AgriVerde. Through this joint venture, AES expects to generate 20 million tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions offsets annually by 2012 through the capture of methane and other gases from agricultural waste. We expect to generate an additional 20 million tonnes of offsets by 2012 through other projects. We continue to look for new ways to reduce and offset greenhouse gas emissions, and are evaluating future investments in alternatives such as solar power and wave technologies.
In 2007, AES made the joint venture with IC İçtaş Enerji Üretim ve Ticaret A.Ş which is the one of the strongest energy leaders in Turkey for growing in the Turkey market by developing 16 new hydro energy power plants in different locations.
AES-IC has always stayed at the forefront of change, as a positive force in the energy sector.