The REM Podcast - Renewable Energy Movement

Stefano Girolami arrived in London from Naples nearly 15 years ago planning to stay six months. He stayed for over a decade, built a career across five countries, and eventually joined a six-person startup that has since scaled to over a hundred people across Europe.

He is now the Group CTO of Innovo Renewables. But this isn’t just a conversation about technology todays episode taps into a masterclass in leadership, resilience, and why your professional relationships are your most valuable currency.

As Stefano sits down with Tom Essex to discuss the "scars" of the feed-in tariff crash, the reality of managing teams more senior than yourself at 25, and why he chose the chaos of a startup over the security of a global utility, they discuss the following:

• The Pivot: From Naples to London and finding a footing in the UK solar market.
• The Market Crash: Surviving the feed-in tariff collapse and being made redundant twice before age 30.
• The "Young Leader" Challenge: Managing peers and senior experts as a first-time manager.
• Scaling a Giant: Navigating the Solar Century acquisition by Statkraft and the transition to corporate life.
• Startup DNA: Joining Innovo at the ground floor and building a team of 100+ from scratch.
• Hiring Strategy: Why he prioritizes junior talent and "proceduralized" workflows.
• The Horizon: Future predictions for the Italian and European solar markets over the next 24 months.

• Guest: Stefano Girolami (Group CTO, Innovo Renewables)
• Host: Tom Essex

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Alexis Gonzalez graduated as a mechanical engineer in Venezuela in 2001 and walked straight into one of the biggest petrochemical projects in the country’s history. That early exposure to scale and complexity shaped everything that followed.

Over the next 25 years he worked his way through oil and gas, biofuel, offshore wind, hydro and now data center infrastructure. He has managed over $20 billion worth of projects, led teams spread across nine different countries and built a career defined by one consistent belief: that nothing is impossible if you have the right team.

He is now Director of Project Controls at Andritz in Montreal, working on the refurbishment of hydro power facilities across North America that were built 50 to 100 years ago and now need a new generation of turbines.

In this conversation with Tom Essex, Alexis reflects on everything the journey has taught him, and shares a candid read on where the data center and energy industries are heading, he talks about:

∙ Starting in Venezuela’s oil and gas mega projects and what that teaches you about scale

∙ A biofuel project in Canada that turned garbage into ethanol

∙ Supporting Horn Sea 2 for Ørsted, one of the world’s biggest offshore wind farms

∙ What Nordic work culture gets right that North America does not

∙ The transformer lead time problem quietly threatening the data center boom

∙ Why some hyperscaler projects will not survive to the end of the decade

∙ China’s nuclear and hydro infrastructure play and what the US might learn from it

∙ Why retention is always a byproduct of culture and not of salary

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Philipp Walther didn't plan to work in renewables.

A conversation with a headhunter after a career in sales leadership opened the door and he didn’t hesitate to walk through it.

What followed was a journey through the biggest names in German renewable energy, Notus, Uniper, Aukera. Each role added a new perspective concerning development, leadership, and what it actually means to build something long-lasting.

Today, Philipp is Senior Vice President Development at Emernor, the German arm of Norwegian investor Magnora.

It's a Small team that highly specialized with a serious pipeline.

In this episode, we dig into the reality of the German market and more on:

• The Sales Edge: Why a background in sales is the perfect (if unlikely) preparation for project development.
• The Grid Bottleneck: Why grid connections remain the defining challenge across Europe.
• BESS as Essential: Why Battery Energy Storage is no longer an "optional add-on" for the transition.
• And, Market Consolidation: Philipp’s prediction on why many companies active today won’t be standing in five years.

His view on municipality relationships is an attention grab. In a competitive market, they are the only foundation that matters.

The full episode is live!

#RenewableEnergyMovement #BESS #EnergyTransition #Leadership #Germany #Emernor

Andrea Sivini has spent more than 25 years on the vendor side of infrastructure projects. ABB. Siemens. Schneider Electric. Wind farms in Italy. Solar farms in southern Italy. A three-year substation project in Uganda. Data centers across Poland, Israel and the rest of Central and Eastern Europe. And in 2024 he crossed the table.

He is now Country Manager for Italy at MICIM, a UK company building critical infrastructure for data center and renewable energy customers across Europe and beyond. This conversation is about what that shift looks like from the inside, and where he believes the industry is heading.

Andrea is one of those guests who has clearly thought deeply about leadership, clearly as a management concept and also as a practical discipline shaped by years of working with multicultural teams under serious pressure. His views on talent retention are particularly worth sitting with. And his vision for integrated renewable and data center infrastructure is already in motion.

In this episode:

• The three projects that defined his career including three years in Uganda
• What managing cross-continental teams across cultures actually requires
• The difference between attracting talent and retaining it
• Why data centers are more complex than renewables and what that means for leaders
• Italy as a Mediterranean gateway to North Africa and the Middle East
• The integrated data center, solar and battery storage vision he is already working on
• Why universities are the most underused talent pipeline in the industry

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What do you do when the support you need doesn’t exist? You build it!

This week I sit down with Julia Ward, Project Director at Xela Energy and founder of FLISS a free UK-based mentoring charity supporting women in STEM. Julia’s career spans chemical engineering, carbon capture, solar development, coal asset operations, batteries, and private wire renewables. And somewhere in the middle of all of that, she noticed a gap and decided to fill it herself.

This Wednesday Julia talks through all of it, the career pivots, the moments of clarity, the transferable skills she picked up in unexpected places, and what it actually takes to retain good people in a market that moves faster than almost any other. She also makes a compelling case for why everyone should have three mentors, not one… and what the difference between a mentor and a sponsor actually is.

In this episode:

• Chemical engineering to renewables, an 'unconventional' path
• E.ON’s graduate scheme and a solar placement in San Francisco
• What coal asset management taught her about project delivery
• How FLISS was born and what’s next for the charity
• The three-mentor framework and how to think about job moves
• Private wire energy (the model and the market)
• UK renewables predictions for the next 12 to 18 months

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FLISS — Free Mentoring for Women in STEM: https://www.fliss.uk/

Yvonne Strzys didn’t plan to spend her career in solar but a rooftop system she spotted at a friend’s house in 1999 set everything in motion.

Today she’s Head of Project Development at MaxSolar GmbH, leading a Berlin office that scaled from 3 to 30 people in three years, overseeing a pipeline of ground-mounted solar and multi-utility projects across Germany.

In this conversation Yvonne gets honest about what the German renewable energy market actually looks like from the inside the grid connection bottlenecks, the influx of international competition, the maturity that comes with economic pressure, and why the industry’s next chapter has to be built on collaboration.

She also speaks candidly about navigating engineering as a woman, the value of community through programs like Women of New Energy, and what she looks for when building teams people genuinely want to stay in. A thoughtful, grounded conversation about the realities of project development in one of Europe’s most active solar markets.

In this episode: ∙ The engineer-to-developer career transition and why it’s an advantage ∙ Germany’s grid connection landscape in 2026 ∙ Scaling from rooftop to large-scale ground-mounted solar ∙ Building and retaining diverse teams in a competitive market ∙ Multi-utility projects: solar, wind and battery working together ∙ Her advice to young women entering engineering today

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How do you go from navigating two insolvencies to building one of Europe’s most resilient solar developers?

This week I sat down with Bernd Kipping, VP Finance, Procurement, Innovations & Technologies at Chint Solar Europe. His career is basically a timeline of everything this industry has been through. We get into:

1. The Solar Valley Era: What it was really like at Q-Cells when Chinese competition started changing everything.
2. The Startup Grind: Building Chint Solar Europe from 5 people to 130 across 8 markets.
3. The Multi-Utility Shift: Why Bernd thinks pure-play solar is no longer enough and what BESS, wind and hydrogen change about the model.
4. Navigating the TSO: The early Dutch grid connection story that says everything about what it means to build from scratch.
5. Market Predictions: Why the UK and Southern Europe are the ones to watch, and his long view on green hydrogen.

Connect with Bernd: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bernd-kipping-7131093a/

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For Kim Collins, Director of Project Development for Clear Light Energy, the answer was simple: She wanted to put the puck in the net.

In this week’s episode, Kim shares how she deliberately stepped back from seniority to master the technical "weeds" of protection and control. It’s a move most wouldn't have the humility to make, but for Kim, it was the catalyst for everything that followed.

She’s since gone on to oversee more than 5GW of wind, solar, and storage across North America.

Whether you're an engineer, a developer, or just navigating your own career pivot, Kim’s perspective is as honest as it gets.

#RenewableEnergy #CleanEnergy #EnergyTransition #WomenInEngineering #Podcast #CareerStrategy

Tom Essex: linkedin.com/in/tomessex

Kim Collins: linkedin.com/in/kimvandenheuvelpeng

In this episode of the REM Podcast, Tom speaks with Moritz Duhm, Regional Manager Onshore Wind & PV at ENERGTRAG, about how Germany’s wind market got to where it is today.

Moritz shares hard-earned lessons from over a decade in the industry, including the unintended consequences of the 2017 tender reform, the risks of developer saturation, and how the legal framework is shaping the onshore wind space.

They discuss:

1. How Germany’s early wind boom led to a correction that caught many developers off guard
2. Why permitting bottlenecks have been replaced by tender oversubscription
3. How strategic bidding created a legal and commercial minefield in 2017–2020
4. The future of consolidation and professionalisation in Germany’s renewables sector

If you work in onshore wind, policy, or development strategy, this episode offers a great insight to the evolution of one of Europe’s most important renewable markets.

Connect with Tom: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tomessex/?lipi=urn%3Ali%3Apage%3Ad_flagship3_profile_view_base_contact_details%3BgbD2KDOSSYODOs398hiWKg%3D%3D

Connect with Mortiz: https://www.linkedin.com/in/moritz-duhm-b664a2257?lipi=urn%3Ali%3Apage%3Ad_flagship3_profile_view_base_contact_details%3BCghAjOfYQh%2BA3tJtc0dY1g%3D%3D

In this episode of the REM Podcast, Tom speaks with Mathieu Lassagne, CEO of ZE-Energy, about building a hybrid solar and storage company before it was mainstream.

Before founding ZE-Energy, Mathieu spent several years at ENGIE, where he worked on corporate strategy and led the acquisition of Solairedirect, a successful solar developer in France at the time.

Now, with ZE-Energy, he’s applying the lessons he learned to build a different kind of company. One that combines solar, storage and real-time optimisation to respond to market needs in real time.

They discuss:

- Why being first to market with hybrid storage was a risk worth taking

- What real-time optimisation actually looks like in asset management

- Why grid congestion can’t be solved by infrastructure alone

- The challenges of re-powering older PV sites post-subsidies

- What he learned from ENGIE’s acquisition of Solairedirect

- The experiences that shaped him as an entrepreneur

Connect with Tom: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tomessex/

Connect with Mathieu: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mathieu-lassagne-994406/