The Concorde Capital investment group plans to invest EUR120 million in energy projects by the end of this year and expects to build an energy company worth more than $1 billion in “a couple of years,” according to founder and owner Igor Mazepa.
“By the end of the year, we will invest EUR120 million. The market is a ‘blue ocean’ with no competition, so it’s just a matter of getting started. The IRR in this case is 35%, which means a return on investment in 2.5-3 years,” Mazepa said at the Forbes Money forum in Kyiv.
According to him, the market expects gas prices to rise and electricity prices to fall, but with a projected payback period of 2-3 years, investors will already feel more confident.
Mazepa noted that he first invested in the energy sector in August 2024, investing EUR 32 million in a pilot project, and is already seeing the first results of this investment, which confirm the correctness of this strategy.
In his opinion, such prospects are related to the fact that 10 GW of power capacity has been destroyed by the aggressor, and this is mainly maneuverable capacity, which is the most expensive and for which the market pays a premium price.
“There has never been such a price, not once, not in a single year that I can remember in the last 25 years.
It is even higher than in some Eastern European countries. It’s an amazing market, huge, worth billions of dollars!“ emphasized the owner of Concorde Capital, adding that gas and electricity prices are expected to rise further.
”I think that in a couple of years we will build just such a billion-dollar company in the energy sector,” he concluded.
As reported, Mazepa, with the help of four unnamed partners, acquired a 50 MW energy storage system for EUR 32 million in early 2025 and plans to then contract equipment for a gas-fired power plant worth EUR 30 million to create a single energy complex.
Alexei Timofeev, a member of the board of directors of BGV Group Management, who spoke alongside Mazepa, agreed that there are attractive investment opportunities in the energy sector, where the group has also accepted five projects – wind, batteries, gas cogeneration, and investments in the energy efficiency of utility networks through an energy service company. At the same time, he stressed that these are short-term and relatively small projects, and that this “hot” market is not about billions in investments.
“This is simply an illustration of the approach that exists, which does not work in the long term. Because it is impossible to make long-term forecasts based on peak prices without taking into account factors such as the return or non-return of the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant, the restoration or non-restoration of coal-fired power generation… In general, when you jump above zero in three years, you can afford such things, but no billions will come here – there is nowhere to go,” the expert believes.
He added that Ukraine does not need to restore 10 GW of destroyed energy capacity because it does not have such a deficit. “Ukraine’s energy sector was in surplus before the war, and everything that has been destroyed is reflected in the fact that we have deindustrialization, loss of territory, and loss of population,” Timofeev said.
