Among the new business lines it is evaluating, Colbún is working on projects to desalinate water for industrial use. "Colbún has been moving and pumping water for 40 years," says its CEO, José Ignacio Escobar. The executive warns about overinvestment in the storage systems sector: "Let's learn from past mistakes and not create a problem on the scale of the spillage we saw with batteries," he says, referring to the 10,000 MW that will be installed in Chile within two years.

Today, José Ignacio Escobar is one of the leading voices in his sector in the country, and he does not hide his concerns about the national electricity system. "It is well known that Chile did a remarkable job over the last 15 years developing renewable energy: solar, wind and batteries. That gave us installed capacity nearly four times our demand," he notes. His diagnosis is that there is "a lot of energy we are not able to use."

To back this up, Escobar points to data showing that last year a huge amount of generated electricity was wasted that could have been used. "The main challenge we have as a sector is to make efficient use of the abundance of energy we have," he warns.

Chile currently has 40,000 MW of generation capacity while demand is only 10,000 MW. With this overcapacity, Escobar highlights: "Last year alone we lost nearly 7 terawatts (one million MW) of energy. In other words, we threw it away, because we were unable to use it — equivalent to about 8% of the country's total consumption, or the demand of a large mine or a mid-sized city."