The REM Podcast - Renewable Energy Movement

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...

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...

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 wi...

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...

In this episode of the REM Podcast, Tom speaks with Nikolaos Karagiovanidis, Director of Project Development at Chint Green Energy, about what it really takes to build successful solar and battery projects across multiple European markets. Nikolaos shares lessons from a career that’s taken him from EPC work in Greece and Turkey to leading development across the Balkans, Baltics, and Nordics , incl...

In this episode of the REM Podcast, Tom sits down with Filippo Ricci, General Manager Italy at Recurrent Energy (subsidiary of Canadian Solar), to talk about what really drives success in renewable energy: projects and people. They cover: - Why “projects and people” are the two real assets in renewable energy - How M&A experience shapes leadership and commercial decisions - What growing a team...

In this episode of the REM Podcast, Tom sits down with Luca Marini, CEO of LIO DC - the data centre platform of LIO Factory, a real estate holding company investing in infrastructure, renewables and beyond. Luca shares why LIO is one of the few platforms in Italy designing renewables and data centres together from day one, rather than treating them as separate industries. He talks about what it me...

In this first ever in-person episode of the REM Podcast, host Tom Essex speaks to Rodolfo Bigolin, CEO of Innovo Group - a true serial entrepreneur who’s built multiple infrastructure companies across renewables, EV charging and data centres. He explains why his team took construction in-house, how they managed to deliver 11 solar plants at once, and why retention and culture have been key to scal...

In this episode of the REM Podcast, Tom speaks with Carlo Toic, Co-Founder and COO of SOL-R Global Infrastructures, a real estate platform specialising in land strategies for renewable energy projects. Carlo makes a bold case: IPP ownership of land is bad finance. From tax inefficiencies to illiquidity, he explains why mixing real estate and energy assets on the same balance sheet hurts returns, c...

In this episode of the REM Podcast, host Tom speaks with Laurens van Ochten, Head of BESS at R.Power, a fast‑growing European renewable energy developer specialising in large‑scale solar and battery storage. Laurens shares deep insights into the challenges of scaling battery storage across multiple countries, while managing market differences, grid bottlenecks and team structure. He also explains...

In this episode of the REM Podcast, host Tom Essex speaks with Francisco Díez Quiralte, former Global Head of Business Development at Zelestra. Francisco’s career spans three continents, having originated large-scale renewable energy projects across Spain, Germany, Chile, Brazil, Mexico, India and more. They talk about: How he built a 100+ person team across Latin America from scratch Competing wi...

In this episode of the REM Podcast, Tom sits down with Alexandros Kalargyros, Head of Engineering & Construction at EDP Renewables. Alexandros’ career has taken him across four continents, from small villages in Zambia, to large solar farms in the US. They discuss: His experiences delivering renewable energy projects in Africa, the US and Europe. How Greece is positioning itself as a strategic...