The REM Podcast - Renewable Energy Movement

This week, Tom speaks with Sarim Sheikh, Chair and Partner at Faradeum.

Sarim’s career started in oil and gas at Shell, where valuation work in the mid-2000s gave him his first taste of renewables, including the very first offshore wind project in the Netherlands. Years later at GE, he was selling clean energy to oil-producing countries across the Middle East, North Africa, Turkey and Pakistan, and then building GE’s offshore wind business from scratch.

After almost 29 years inside two of the world’s biggest companies, he stepped out to build something of his own, an AI business for the energy industry, while sitting on boards including Octopus Renewables and the Port of Dover.

In this episode, we talk about:

• Moving from oil and gas into renewables in 2004 and 2005
• Selling renewables to oil-producing nations
• Why you can’t copy and paste an operating model from one country to another
• The decision to leave a 29-year corporate career, and what AI had to do with it
• How Faradeum uses AI on safety, logistics and contract management
• Why the energy industry has always been in the eighth car of the train

Links:

Sarim Sheikh on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sarimsheikh/

Faradeum: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sarimsheikh/

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Grace Kankindi is Deputy Head of Investment Management at Aquila Clean Energy. She grew up in Rwanda, where once a month everyone, even the head of state, comes out to clean up their community. That stayed with her.

In this episode, Grace walks us through her career. A biodigester project in Canada that showed her how much money decides what gets built. A master's at Yale. Four years in Washington DC working on solar tax equity. Two years working for the Rwandan government, including through COVID. And now Hamburg, where she invests in renewables and battery storage across Europe.

We also talk about why a good asset isn't always a good investment, why the same battery project can look so different in Italy and Germany, and where she thinks battery storage is going next.

Links to Grace's Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gracekankindi/?isSelfProfile=false

and Aquila Clean Energy:https://www.linkedin.com/company/aquila-clean-energy/home/

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Ypatios Moysiadis has spent more than 20 years working in renewable energy across over a dozen European markets. His career started around the time of Greece’s first feed-in tariff, and today he leads sales across the UK, Ireland and Denmark at BELECTRIC.

In this episode, Ypatios shares his view on where the renewable energy industry stands today and why its rapid growth has also created some big challenges.

We talk about what happens when solar and wind grow faster than the grid, storage and electricity demand can keep up with, as well as negative power prices, slow grid upgrades, public trust and the impact of changing energy policies.

It’s an open conversation about what the industry has achieved, what hasn’t worked as well, and what needs to change next.

🎙️ A new episode of the Renewable Energy Movement Podcast is out now.

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This week on the Renewable Energy Movement Podcast, host Tom Essex is joined by Joaquín Aparicio, founder of Energía Circular. Joaquín's career started almost by chance, from a mining project on his family's land in Spain to seven years building grid connections in Scotland, to helping stand up Scottish Power's solar and battery business from just two employees.

Joaquín and Tom talk through his path from Iberdrola and Scottish Power to development director at JBM (later acquired by RWE), and the decision that changed everything: walking away from an executive role to found Energía Circular, a biomethane company built from his family's home village in Spain. They cover what biomethane actually is, why Spain is years behind countries like Germany and France, and Joaquín's honest take on what it actually takes to bet on yourself.

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Carmelo Bongiovanni is Managing Director of Enevo Group and CEO of Enevo Spain, and his career started with a stroke of luck: two weeks after joining his first company in Milan, it got bought out, putting him in the room with international clients and investment banks before he'd even finished training.

From there it's taken him through the UK and then to Japan, where at just 27 he set up an entire company entity from scratch, no local team, no head office to fall back on. He's since run operations across Australia, India, Mexico, Spain and Jordan, and today leads Enevo Group, where his team is building one of the biggest tracker-mounted solar farms ever constructed in Europe.

Tom and Carmelo talk through what it actually takes to build a business in a country where you don't speak the language, why Carmelo calls himself a generalist who surrounds himself with experts, and the biggest gamble of his career, one he says paid off a million times over.

New episodes of the Renewable Energy Movement Podcast every Wednesday.

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Roberto Jimenez is Executive Director of BW ESS in Germany and previously spent more than 13 years at Shell, most recently as VP of Onshore Power Europe.

In this episode, Roberto takes us through a career that started far away from renewables. He grew up between the Philippines, Brazil, Guatemala and Cameroon because of his father’s work, before starting his own career at a small engineering company in Louisiana.

He was originally hired because he spoke Spanish, but ended up helping the company grow its business across Latin America. His early work covered everything from air permits and landfills to incinerators and he even holds a US patent for an incinerator design.

In 2014, he joined Shell’s early move into renewables. He went on to sign Shell’s first solar deal himself and helped grow the business into something worth close to a billion dollars.

Then he decided to start again.

Roberto left Shell to build BW ESS’s battery storage business in Germany from the ground up.

Tom and Roberto also talk about the duck curve, why Roberto saw the opportunity in batteries early, and where he thinks the BESS market could be heading between now and 2030.

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This week, Tom sits down with Alvaro Sanz, Director of Development at Enerside, who has worked on renewable energy and grid challenges across Chile, Mexico, Spain and Italy.

They talk about the blackouts in Chile and Spain, why similar grid problems keep showing up in different countries, and what the industry can learn from them.

Alvaro also shares how he helped grow Enerside’s storage pipeline from zero to more than 3 GW, and the side project he’s building to make one of the hardest parts of development much quicker — finding the right site for a project.

If you’re interested in where renewables, storage and the grid are heading, this is a good one. 🎙️

This week on the Renewable Energy Movement Podcast, Tom sits down with James Innes, Head of UK Development at Elmia.

James started out in oil and gas before moving into renewables in 2005, joining Iberdrola as the UK onshore wind market was starting to grow.

Since then, he’s seen almost every side of the UK renewables market, from developing wind projects with Iberdrola and Scottish Power, to moving into solar, and now working on battery storage at Elmia, where he’s helping manage a 7 GW portfolio across 14 projects.

In this episode, James explains what the UK’s CP2030 grid changes actually mean for developers, why getting a grid connection now looks more like an auction than a queue, and why he believes the UK needs around £100 billion of new grid infrastructure by 2035.

We also talk about what he sees as one of the biggest risks to renewables: oil and gas becoming cheap again and why solar and battery technology needs to keep getting cheaper to compete.

We cover:

• Moving from oil and gas into onshore wind in 2005

• Building wind projects with Iberdrola and Scottish Power

• Why a major wind project in Wales never got built

• Moving from wind into solar

• What CP2030 means for UK grid connections

• Why battery storage struggled under the new grid rules

• The £100 billion of grid investment James believes the UK still needs

• Why cheap oil and gas could be a major challenge for renewables

🎧 Listen now wherever you get your podcasts.

What if the answer to grid congestion isn’t always a battery? 👀

This week, Tom sits down with Lukas Pfeiffer, CEO and Co-Founder of Gridmetry, to talk about why flexible data centres could be one of the most overlooked tools available to renewable energy developers.

Lukas took a very different route into the industry... From telecoms and data centre consulting, to Bitcoin mining, and eventually to building Gridmetry into one of Europe’s largest flexibility providers for data centres. That background gives him a very different way of looking at the grid.

They get into why 1 MW of flexible data centre capacity can provide similar economic value to 8 MWh of battery storage at around a quarter of the cost, why the Nordics are leading the way, what happens when growing AI demand meets an already stretched grid, and what Europe’s energy system could look like in 10 years if this model takes off.

It’s one of those conversations that might change how you think about what belongs next to a renewable energy project.

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In Part 2 with Tom Essex, Paolo Tusa gets into what’s really happening in the Italian renewable energy market.

They talk about why the market is heading towards more consolidation, why trying to operate across too many countries doesn’t always work, and why Paolo walked away from Enfinity Global when the pressure around the IPO became too much.

Paolo also explains why he sees renewable energy as a marathon, not a sprint, why many of Italy’s authorised solar projects may never actually get built, and how falling battery prices could change project economics over the next few years.

And to finish, he shares the one change he would make to Italy’s regulatory system if he had the chance.

Missed Part 1? It’s already in the feed. 🎙️

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