ReWiRE - Women like me

Emma is Community Energy England's chief executive, having been instrumental in developing the organisation since its creation by a group of community energy practitioners. Emma has over fifteen years’ experience in sustainable development, working for the public, private and community sectors. She has on the ground experience of community energy, as previous to her role at Community Energy England, Emma was general manager of Sheffield Renewables. Her role included project management of community renewable energy schemes, developing and managing community share offers and supporting the development of community energy across the South Yorkshire region. 

Felicity is a partner at Everoze, an employee-owned clean energy consultancy, and non-exec director at the Centre for Sustainable Energy (CSE). She’s recently become director of LiveDiligence, a software-as-a-service business enabling accelerated, smarter due diligence of renewables and storage investments. 

Emma Pinchbeck is the chief executive of Energy UK, a position that she has held since July 2020. She is an expert in whole-economy decarbonisation and the energy transition. She also holds several board advisory positions. Emma had her first baby in October 2019 and shares childcare with her husband. She is passionate about efforts to improve diversity in the energy industry.

From 2016-2020, she served as deputy CEO of the trade body Renewable UK, in which role she also sat on the Board of Scottish Renewables. Prior to this, Emma was head of climate change at WWF-UK. She has an MA from the University of Oxford.

Co-founder and CEO at Repowering, chair of Community Energy England and a trustee on the board of Friends of the Earth. Prior to founding Repowering, she was a senior policy advisor at the Department of Energy and Climate Change. She is a community energy specialist with more than 10 years experience working in the sector at local and national levels, including spearheading Lambeth council’s community energy programme. She has a MA in Geography and MEnv in Environment, Science and Society as well as an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Essex. In 2016 Afsheen was awarded an MBE for her work delivering renewable energy to deprived London communities and, in 2018, she won the Regen Clean Energy Pioneer award.

Philippa is an infrastructure finance specialist within the Infrastructure and Projects Authority (part of the Cabinet Office). Prior to joining the UK Government in 2013, Philippa was a Partner at the professional services firm EY, and had previously been in investment banking for many years. In the IPA, Philippa advises Government departments on projects in the energy, transport, water, and digital sectors. For example, she recently led on the setting up of the £400m Charging Infrastructure Investment Fund for electric vehicle charging.

Kayte is head of markets for the ESO, accountable for developing markets to enable future operation of Great Britain’s electricity system on the path to net zero.

She joined National Grid PLC in 2002 and has held a wide variety of senior roles across the business, most recently as Head of Strategy and Regulation for the ESO. Prior to that, she spent three years in Boston with National Grid’s US electricity distribution businesses.

Kayte holds a first-class degree in Business Economics and is a graduate of the Harvard Business School Program for Leadership Development.

Dr Cathy McClay is trading and optimisation director at Sembcorp Energy UK, which has the largest portfolio of distributed, flexible assets operating in the GB market.

Cathy has 20 years’ experience in the electricity industry.  She has worked for a number of energy companies in the UK, France and the Netherlands, specialising in modelling and analysis for trading, risk management and strategy. Immediately prior to joining Sembcorp she was Head of Future Markets at National Grid SO where she was responsible for developing the GB electricity and gas markets.  A key focus was on opening up the ancillary serviced markets to new sources of flexibility such as demand side response.

Cathy is an engineer with a PhD from St John’s College, Cambridge and is a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering.

Sonya Bedford has been advocating for renewable energy for the last 18 years through both her role as solicitor and community energy practitioner. Her drive to bring forward renewable energy projects comes from a deep-rooted passion for sustainability and a long-held mission to facilitate as many wind turbines as possible. An MSc in Renewable Energy from the Centre for Alternative technology added technical know-how to legal knowledge and Sonya is a partner in her law firm, a consultant for Bristol City Council, Non-executive director of Regen and on the board for five community energy companies.