Sebastián Kind

For them to produce clean energy for decades at almost zero operational cost, which makes them competitive against fossil fuels, but only in the long term.

Long-term investments are really the challenge in risky markets like Argentina.

As for the second question, the economic crisis, get this, I always knew that this was because of politics and what I call mismanagement, but there was something else there, energy.

Argentina is a country super rich in natural resources, but we've been importing fossil fuels for decades, and of course, fuels that had to be paid for with money that we never had.

So it became clear to me that if we really want to make the energy transition work, we have to finally find a way to get private investment into the long term.

And if we could do it, we can tackle both things at once, climate change and the economic strain of spending hard currency we don't have in importing energy we don't actually need.

Argentina has tried four times since 1990 to develop its renewable resources and failed each time because, of course, the transition from fossil fuels to renewables doesn't happen because someone like me here on a TED Talk says it should.

It happens because it is convenient.

And convenient, particularly in emerging markets, means economically viable for both the buyer and the seller.

And here's where I found that my country was one of the hardest countries where to invest long-term in the world.

But why?

Because historically, we had the habit of changing the rules halfway through.

Can we imagine what it means to convince an investor to put their money into something that spans multiple administrations?

Four?

Five?

Listen, we had five presidents in ten days in the early 2000s.

It's just too risky.

So the rule here is a short-term investment rule.

And when you want to build your wind or solar farm and get your investment back in only a few years, the result is that the unit of energy is too expensive, and it's not competitive against fossil fuels.

So here we go.