VANCOUVER, March 24 (Reuters) - North America's renewable energy market is an attractive target, but Abu Dhabi's Masdar Power will take its time deciding which projects it will pursue, the company's chief executive said on Wednesday.
"We're not in a hurry. We're always looking for quality rather than quantity and speed," Frank Wouters said on the sidelines of Globe 2010, an environmental business conference in Vancouver.
Masdar Power, a unit of Abu Dhabi state-owned green energy firm Masdar, currently has no projects in Canada or the United States, having kept its investments to Europe and the Middle East.
"We're looking at the U.S. market and the Canadian market for investments in solar and wind," Wouters said. "We're exploring right now."
Wouters said it will be important for Masdar Power to team up with companies that have similar business models and have the local political knowledge needed for any renewable energy projects to be developed.
"In that respect, I would rather take my time looking for a good partner who will make life a lot easier in the way going forward," he said.
Masdar has so far focused on technologies of concentrated solar power, which uses mirrors or lenses to to focus sunlight to heat water for steam generation, and photovoltaic, which produces electricity through solar cells, as well as on offshore wind power generation.
It is not interested in other renewable energy technologies such as biomass.
"It's not that we have anything against them ... but there is only so much that we can do, and it has to be relevant, to some extent, for Abu Dhabi," Wouters said.
The Masdar group is probably best known for its plans to build a carbon-neutral city in Abu Dhabi, a project Wouters told the conference will help it develop new environmental technologies.
Masdar's venture capital unit is also pursuing potential investments in clean energy technologies. Its first fund is fully deployed at $250 million, and the second recently closed at $265 million.
"We can expand to $750 million over the next year so it is going to be a substantial venture capital fund, and there are options for that," Wouters said. (Reporting Allan Dowd; editing by Rob Wilson)
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