The REM Podcast - Renewable Energy Movement

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...

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 pa...

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 entir...

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 compa...

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...

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 mov...

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 t...

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...

Paolo Tusa didn't plan a career in renewable energy. He started out managing one of Europe's biggest construction sites, a coal power plant just outside Rome with nearly 4,000 people on site. Then, in 2009, he made the move into the Italian solar market when the industry was still in its early days. In this episode, Paolo shares how that decision shaped the rest of his career, from building teams...

In Part 2 of our conversation with Roland Flaig , CEO of ANEO , we get into what happens after the big mergers are done and the real work begins Roland walks us through what it was actually like to merge the RWE and E.ON operational teams across 12 countries, what separates a good site manager from a truly great operations leader, why psychological safety on a multi-contractor construction site is...

How does someone go from working in HR to running massive, heavy-duty engineering operations for one of Europe's biggest energy utilities? In Part 1 of this special two-part episode, Tom Essex sits down with Roland Flaig , CEO of Aneo . Roland shares his incredible career pivot and breaks down his unique leadership philosophy: treating your assets like people, and your people like assets. If you w...

Abel de Voogd is Head of Project Development at ABO Energy in the Netherlands. He didn't come from an engineering background. Instead, he studied political science before finding his way into renewable energy, where he's now spent more than 10 years developing solar projects, mainly for the Dutch farming sector. In this episode, Tom and Abel talk about the real challenges of agri-solar. They discu...

This week on REM Rewind, Tom Essex pulls two episodes from the Season 1 archive that were recorded months apart but tell opposite sides of the same story. Laurens van Ochten is Head of BESS at R.Power , where he oversees a centralised team across six European countries. He breaks down how grid access works differently across each market, why Germany's ultra-easy access quietly flooded the system w...

I recorded these conversations months apart and genuinely didn't plan this but when I went back into the archive to pull them together, I couldn't believe how much they were saying the same thing from completely opposite ends of the industry. Mathieu Lassagne walked away from 15 years inside ENGIE and EDF to co-found ZE-Energy from scratch. Without any safety net or corporate playbook, just seven...

Two careers built by saying yes when the answer should have been no. This throwback compilation brings together two of the most listened-to conversations from Season One of the Renewable Energy Movement. Ilona Nemeth-Kiss and Alexandros Kalargyros have almost nothing in common on paper. One is a Hungarian lawyer who accidentally built a career in offshore wind after moving to Germany with zero Ger...

Two careers built by saying yes when most people said no. Natalia Paraskevopoulou, Head of Wind Business Development for EMEA at LightSource BP , discovered renewables in a classroom in Athens in 2004. She went on to move to Johannesburg as a 20-something woman in a field dominated by men, earn respect on construction sites by physically doing the job, and build a career that now spans Greece, Sou...

Maria del Puy Ayerra started her career in 2001 at GAMESA, developing wind farms in Spain when "renewable energy" was barely a household term. Over the last two decades, her career has spanned Spain, the UK, and the United States, navigating every market cycle thrown at developers, investors, and consultants. In this conversation with Tom Essex, Maria provides an insider’s view of the Spanish ener...

There Is No Going Back: Ksenia Balanda on Floating Offshore Wind in Italy! Ksenia has spent nearly 20 years at the absolute edge of the energy business. She started with building a 45-person team in nine months in Russia to mastering Italian in "survival mode, " her career has been defined by rapid scale and frontier markets. Now, as the Head of Offshore Wind Italy for Nadara , Ksenia is leading o...

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 master...

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 billio...

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 l...

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...

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...

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...

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: The Solar Valley Era: What it was really like at Q-Cells when Chinese compet...