November 2023 Newsletter

Interconnection: Renewable Energy USA

Welcome to Megawatt Recruitment’s monthly newsletter to keep you connected to what’s going on in the renewable energy industry in the United States and provide more insight, knowledge, and connection to the people and companies who drive our industry.

What People Are Talking About

Recent Personnel Moves and Promotions

  • Dr. Naomi Boness accepted an additional board seat, joining Babcock & Wilcox (B&W), as an NED where her expertise in Natural Gas and Hydrogen are expected to support B&W’s expansion and innovation in these spaces.  She is currently the Co-Managing Director of Stanford University’s Hydrogen Initiative and Managing Director of its Natural Gas Initiative.
  • Van Oord, a global leader in dredging and infrastructure as well as offshore wind is planning a succession of CEOs from Pieter van Oord to Govert van Oord, 5th generation CEO for this family business, with the board scheduled to vote on April 11th, 2024.
  • Pieter van Oord is expected to be appointed as CEO of Schiphol which is Amsterdam’s national airport.
  • Ulrika Ritzén was appointed Head of Onshore Wind for Vattenfall based in Sweden from Hitachi Energy where she was previously SVP of Network Control and Enterprise Software.  She takes over from Jaap Kleerebezem who was Program Manager with Nuon since 2003, which Vattenfall acquired in 2012 to build out its onshore wind platform.
  • Josh Dale re-joined Rabobank as Managing Director and Head of Energy Transition Coverage for North America.
  • Thomas Scali joined Canadian Solar as a Regional Sales Manager based remotely in New York from Enel X where he was in a similar role. California community choice aggregator Peninsula Clean Energy hired Shalini Swaroop as COO, former Chief Legal and Policy officer at MCE Clean Energy, and Nick Bijur as CFO, previously Vice President of Corporate Financial Planning & Analysis (FP&A) for Bloom Energy.
  • Starting January 1st, 2024, Udo Bauer will become CEO of Enercon, German wind turbine manufacturer, from Dr. Jürgen Zeschky.  Udo is currently Chief Operating Officer of Enercon.
  • Backfilling Udo Bauer as COO at Enercon is Heiko Juritz, most recently Group Head of Global Procurement and Supply Chain, based in Germany, with Enercon.
  • After reporting a Q3 loss of $3.2 billion and scrapping two U.S. offshore wind projects, Ørsted’s CFO, Daniel Lerup, and COO, Richard Hunter, have stepped down. Rasmus Errboe from the board and CEO of Europe with be interim-CFO and Andrew Brown from the board and formerly a long time employee with Shell will be interim-COO. Olivia Breese will take over as interim-CEO of Europe, formerly SVP for Europe and Power-to-X.
  • ZOLA Electric, a distributed energy company focused on deploying solar and lithium-ion batteries, has appointed tech investor and advisor David Hatfield to its board of directors.
  • Taking the helm as SVP of Industrial Automation for the U.S. and Canada with Schneider Electric, a global OEM for power, is Heather Cykoski, previously Group VP of the EPC business at ABB.
  • Coming from Pivot Energy where he was Director of Origination, John Stroud has joined Navisun, a solar IPP backed by Canadian pension fund OMERS, focusing on distributed and small utility-scale projects.
  • Following the transition of CEOs last month, PosiGen’s Lisa Neyhart, SVP of Lease Management and Customer Care, announced her retirement.

What the market is talking about: COP28 (Nov 30 – Dec 12)

In 1992, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) established an environmental treaty to combat climate change which was signed by 152 states at the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, informally known as the Earth Summit.  To implement and enforce the framework, the Conference of the Parties (COP) was established as the supreme decision-making body and the first United Nations climate change conference, COP1, took place in Berlin, Germany in March 1995. It has met every year since and has built upon previous meetings with resolutions such as the Kyoto Protocol in 1997 and the Paris Agreement in 2015.

One of the major outcomes expected from this year’s COP28 conference is the first-ever “global stocktake” (GST) which is a process for countries and stakeholders to take stock of where they are collectively making progress against climate change, and specifically, how they are tracking toward meeting or not meeting their goals set during the Paris Agreement. The stocktake is scheduled to take place every 5 years going forward.

The GST assesses progress on three pillars of the fight against climate change: Mitigation, Adaptation, and the Means of Implementation and Support.  This year, it also produced summary reports on how to phase out all fossil fuels in a just transition, set clear timelines and implementation targets to align all public financial flows with low carbon emissions, and means to triple global renewable energy capacity by 2030.

Let’s see what the remaining days in the conference bring!  If you are attending or have an insights, let us know.  We would love to hear your thoughts for our December newsletter.

Talent Acquisition Insights: Active Candidate Engagement

Despite predictions earlier this year that we would face an economic downturn, the U.S. economy outperformed expectations in three key areas:

  • Economic output: The economy grew at a 4.9% annualized rate in the third quarter of 2023. This is the fastest since the fourth quarter of 2021.
  • Labor market: The labor market has been resilient.
  • Inflation: Inflation has slowed. In September, total personal consumption expenditures (PCE) inflation was 0.4%. This is a 3.4% increase over the past 12 months.

Specifically in renewable energy, the Inflation Reduction Act has encouraged growth across the value chain of renewable energy from raw material extraction and processing to equipment and product manufacturing to project development and asset management. For employers, this has meant a more competitive job market where candidates are often already in dynamic and fast-paced jobs, well-compensated, have good prospects for career growth and development, and have built trust equity with their bosses in order to have perks such as flexible hours, remote work, and unlimited PTO (paid time off). Getting these candidates to believe that an interview is worth their time can be difficult and is why active candidate engagement is becoming more important for employers.

While traditional recruitment is linear with a fairly standardized process consisting of identifying, attracting, screening, shortlisting, interviewing, and offering to candidates, employers can differentiate themselves by adding a few engagement points along the way.  Beginning with attractability, employers should always keep succession planning and team expansions in mind and think about ways to engage with potential new hires.  This could take the form of creating a monthly newsletter that is actively pushed out to prospective candidates or hosting a by-invitation-only networking event.  Similarly, once a job opening is confirmed and interviews have commenced, the hiring manager might share an interesting news article about the company directly with the candidate in real time.  In the case of a candidate being local to a company’s office or project site, the employer might extend an invitation for a less formal, in-person meeting such as a coffee or site visit with future peers.  Because technology has made it so easy to conduct the whole recruitment process remotely, in-person meetings are now becoming more of a premium feature of the interview process reserved for senior managers and executives.  Bringing a mid-level or junior candidate on-site can show that you believe in the value he/she will bring to the team as well.

According to LinkedIn, there has been a 20% increase in candidates dropping out of recruitment processes in recent years with one of the Top 3 reasons being that candidates are not having the ability, quantity, or quality of engagement they seek with the hiring manager or company.  So, if you are planning to hire in the next few months, reach out to us at Megawatt Recruitment to talk about how we can help you to optimize your recruitment and engagement strategy so that you do not lose quality candidates from your candidate pool due to lack of active engagement.

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Thank you for joining us for another issue of Interconnection: Renewable Energy USA.  We hope you enjoyed it and we look forward to keeping in touch and exchanging ideas, insights, and opinions.  If you are a company considering hiring, we welcome the opportunity to present our services and capabilities. If you are a candidate, please check our jobs page or reach out to us to discuss your background, skills, and future aspirations.