With less than a month to go before IJ LatAm 25 – "The Miami Conference” as everyone calls it – the Infra Dig podcast turns the focus once again on this burgeoning region.

Running from 10-12 March at 1 Hotel South Beach, Miami, IJ LatAm 2025 has been been IJGlobal’s flagship event for more than 20, and this year we are hosting more than 700 delegates from across the region.

In this latest episode, IJGlobal editorial director Angus Leslie Melville talks to Aitor Alava – managing director and LatAm head of infrastructure and energy finance at Natixis – about the regional lending environment. 

This episode runs for almost 28 minutes with Aitor – who will be appearing on a panel at the conference – taking the listener through the regional lending environment.

This latest episode can be accessed on Spotify (embedded above) as well as through Apple Podcasts and on the Amazon service. It is also hosted across a slew of other platforms, open access on all of them.

Aitor and his team focus on 5 sectors: power and renewables; digital infrastructure; mining; midstream oil and gas; transport; and social infra. Natixis is primarily interested in USD transactions.

As discussion flows, Aitor starts by taking a look at the Chilean renewable energy sector. 

“Chile has decided to make a huge and quick energy transition by promoting a lot of renewables and decommissioning a lot of coal power plants,” says Aitor.

“This has created some issues in the grid – a lot of curtailment. But there is a solution for that, which is to build utility-scale projects with batteries that will provide the ability to shift the demand from the day to the night.

“We have seen a very quick shift in the market. Offtakers have agreed to accommodate to the new needs of the Chilean power market. We see a lot of transactions in Chile which will be solar PV with battery storage.”

Conversation moves on to Peru, a market that has been stagnant for a number of years, but is now taking off again.

“We are seeing a lot of renewables,” says Aitor. “Peru has had a lack of investments into power generation over the last few years because there was a sense that there was some of some over-capacity.

“There had not been enough investment and demand continued to grow. Now there is a need for additional installed capacity and we see a number of renewable energy transactions right now in the market and we have several mandates in Peru.”

This latest episode takes the listener around key LatAm infrastructure and energy finance markets, giving view of where the market sits right now… and a crystal-ball outlook for where it's heading.