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EI Presidential debate: passing the baton
24/7/2024
10 min read
Feature
On 11 July, the day of his appointment as the Energy Institute’s new President, Andy Brown OBE FEI, Ørsted Non-executive Director, spoke informally with Past President of the Energy Institute and founder of Good Energy Juliet Davenport OBE Hon FEI. They discussed their respective professional careers, appreciating energy engineering and the role of the Energy Institute in the energy transition. An edited version of their remarks is below.
Juliet Davenport (JD): Tell us about young Andy – why the energy sector?
Andy Brown (AB): I wanted to see the world. So, when I left university I joined Shell, and worked for 35 years for them. I lived in seven countries and saw the world of energy from an oil and gas perspective, but increasingly taking on the challenges of the energy transition. I spent seven years on the Executive Committee of Shell, and we were really tussling about how we move this juggernaut towards our 2050 commitments, which is a big challenge. Then I went through my own energy transition.
JD: What did that look like?
AB: I quietly retired. Then I got a phone call to go and be a CEO in Portugal. Who doesn’t want to go to Portugal, with a mandate to take Galp [a Portuguese multinational energy corporation] through an energy transition? We grew its renewables portfolio. There was something very exciting about transitioning an oil and gas company to renewables.
I then left there – [after] only a couple of years – to join Ørsted, the poster child of a company that had changed from DONG [a Danish multinational energy company] to Ørsted. Now I am very much tussling with the renewables sector, having lived a life which was very traditional oil and gas.