Sebastián Kind

Because by doing so, we would bring international capital to the game, making renewables competitive against fossil fuels.

So we designed a unique scheme of investment guarantees, something that I love to call the worst-case scenario waterfall.

It consists in three steps.

The first one, what we call the energy payment guarantee.

It is basically a fund established in advance by the government to pay the seller of the energy, like the investors behind the wind or the solar farm, for any payment that the buyer, like the utility, cannot pay for whatever reason.

Interesting.

But we knew that this was not enough.

because we know that the government of Argentina has frequently halted currency conversions and restricted money transfers abroad in past economic crises.

So we had to offer an extra layer of protection to the investors.

We structured a second step, what we call the early termination payment guarantee.

We structured treasury notes that we granted to investors in advance before they committed their investment.

We told them that no matter what the government decides to do, they will get their investment back.

That's beautiful.

But still, something was missing here.

Because we knew that we needed to bring international capital to the game.

So far, we've been protecting the investors from problems within Argentina, but not from Argentina defaulting on its obligations, as unfortunately had happened in the past.

And if there's something money has, it's memory.

So we decided to offer a third-step guarantee.

what we call the international backstop.

To backstop the obligations of the sovereign government, we negotiated a $750 million with the World Bank, one of the least risky institutions in the world.