Jean-Marie Santander is an energy visionary taking on the global giants. Sarah Wachter meets the face of France’s Theolia.

The wind is always blowing off the port of Tangiers in northern Morocco, where the Mediterranean meets the Atlantic and North Africa meets Europe. Jean-Marie Santander knows this breezy terrain intimately. As well as heading the company Theolia, which operates a 50MW wind farm off its shores, he was born in the small village of Boulhaut, 265km away.

Over a more sheltered lunch in Paris, the 57 year-old CEO fires off the other spots that offer the most wind power potential. All are within Theolia’s sights: the North Sea, where the wind blows stiffly and consistently for 4,000 hours a year; France, up to 3,000 hours; Germany, up to 2,200 hours; China, India, and Pakistan. The Tangiers coastline racks up 5,000 hours of gusts a year. Santander’s ambitious plan is to increase Theolia’s capacity six-fold and sell the resulting electricity throughout Europe.

Of all the forms of renewable energy, European analysts say wind is the most “scaleable” – meaning the right system of incentives and subsidies are in place. Wind turbine technology is efficient, which, coupled with EU edicts for countries to produce 21% of electricity from renewable sources by 2010, is fanning a regional investment boom. What’s more, after years of experience, developers are now savvy about managing costs.

France could be become Euope’s third largest wind power nation (after Germany and Spain) within a decade and analysts say that within a year Theolia will figure among the country’s top five wind developers.

“Theolia has a huge pipeline,” says Eduard Sala de Vedruna, senior analyst at the European Wind Energy Advisory Group, part of Barcelona-based Emerging Energy Research. “It is well-positioned with partner GE to finance growth. It’s quite dynamic and aggressive – it doesn’t mind taking risks.”

Wearing a suit and white shirt, the human dynamo that is Santander says he only sleeps about four hours a night, a habit from his days studying, on a full scholarship, for an electrical engineering degree at Paris’s Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers. He followed this by taking two master degrees, in management and in finance, while working full-time. To relax, he runs up mountains.

Today Theolia, whose new headquarters are currently being built in Aix de Provence, has wind farms stretching from France to five states in India, with operations along the way in Spain, Greece, Italy, Brazil, and Germany. Santander pledges he will sign an agreement in China before the year is out – a country that he says must be part of the business plan for any serious global wind developer.

The company is listed on the Euronext Paris mid-cap exchange and has a spin-off outfit for its biomass activities listed in Brussels. This has provoked barbs from some French analysts, who moan that multiple listings makes a company’s activities opaque.

Santander is unyielding on this issue. “If there is one thing I regret, it is not listing sooner. I took too long analysing the situation before tapping the capital markets.”

To make up for his tardiness, Santander has taken under his wing three aspiring entrepreneurs whom he has coached through their stock market listings, including a Moroccan window manufacturer and an American event planner.