Catherine O’Kelly begins our interview with her own questions. The managing director of Bord Gáis Energy is sitting in her well-lit study in her redbrick home in Ballsbridge, Dublin 4. She has been locked down there with her family for most of the last few months.

O’Kelly is only 36. But she is already a veteran in the energy business, having worked in Nigeria, Indonesia and London before coming to Dublin two years ago. In a few months, she is stepping down after leading a team of 350 people in a time of great change in the Irish energy industry – from the rise of renewables to the disruption of Covid-19.

O’Kelly is smart, ably defusing controversial questions. She also does not take herself too seriously. She has done her research, asking intelligent questions about the business of The Currency, as well as inquiring about the recent birth of my daughter. O’Kelly is six months pregnant herself, and eager to find out what it was like to give birth during Covid-19. As is often the case with journalists, I am able to give a near first-hand report without the heavy-lifting: “Incredible – but different! Midwives wearing masks and goggles did not prevent them from being very human and kind.”

“It is reassuring to hear stories from mothers doing well,” O’Kelly says. “I’ve been going to my antenatal appointments in Holles Street and it has been really impressive.”

O’Kelly is pretty impressive herself. She leads a team managing 730,000 customers ranging from ordinary homes to energy-hungry multinationals, generating sales of more than €1 billion a year. It’s been a good last two years in Ireland, she admits, even if Bord Gáis Energy has faced one of its greatest ever challenges with Covid-19 impacting not just its customers but its entire business.

As O’Kelly’s journey in Ireland comes to an end, where to begin?

“We do have a close eye on cost control”

Before my video call with Catherine O’Kelly, I watched a video she made for her team and customers three months ago on Youtube when Covid-19 first really emerged in Ireland. O’Kelly is articulate and clear, as she outlines how Bord Gáis Energy was preparing for what she described as “a very challenging environment”. Preparations, however, rarely survive the battle. How badly has Covid-19 impacted Bord Gáis Energy? “It has been challenging for our customers and therefore challenging for us as a business,” O’Kelly replies. “We started by taking a very customer-first approach.”

Bord Gáis Energy, according to O’Kelly, knew that many of its customers had real fears about being able to pay their bills, as businesses shuttered and unemployment rocketed. “We tried to be as communicative as we could both with our residential and business customers,” she says. “We told them we have a range of options and we would like to put you on a sustainable payment plan so you feel you are in control of how you pay us and this becomes something that isn’t a worry.”

O’Kelly says Bord Gáis Energy had moved to do this even before the energy industry introduced a disconnection moratorium, to ensure nobody faced a lockdown without power. “It was just the right thing to do.”

Besides its customers, she says, Bord Gáis Energy has also been impacted by changing consumption patterns as people left their offices to work from home or long-standing clients like restaurants or bars closed entirely. At the same time its servicing business went from thriving as it installed smart metering and repaired boilers, to being highly restricted. “We kept up essential servicing but we had to radically reduce everything else,” she says.

“It is now only just beginning to come back to normal, albeit a new normal with enhanced safety protocols.”

Bord Gáis Energy was profitable last year in Ireland, with a growing turnover. How will Covid-19 impact its bottom line? “We are building up to our half-year results imminently,” O’Kelly says. “So I can’t comment specifically on where our revenue figures will go but there is no doubt we will see an impact from it.

“It is early to comment on the default rate because we are still going through the billing cycles that relate to this period.”

“In our business customer base, we saw demand decline about 10 per cent for our large industrial commercial customers and around 30 per cent for our SME customers,” O’Kelly says. “Of course, that varied very significantly by sector… Hospitality, leisure and entertainment were hit hardest as you’d expect with the biggest declines in consumption. There was some increase in residential customer energy use but not huge, potentially up to 5 per cent.”

O’Kelly says the rise might have been larger had lockdown not occurred during relatively warm weather. In June Centrica, the owner of British Gas as well as Bord Gáis Energy, announced plans to cut 5,000 jobs or a fifth of its workforce.

O’Kelly says Bord Gáis Energy had escaped any cuts to its 350-strong team. “We do have a close eye on cost control… We run the business in a lean way and we’ll keep redoubling our efforts to do that.”

“There is very close scrutiny of any cash that gets spent but we still have a continuing commitment to investing too as it is what we need to do to position ourselves for the long-term,” she added.

Bord Gáis Energy, she says, had a big repair and servicing business, which had shrunk to just 10 per cent in size during the lockdown. “It is only recently we have been back out offering all job types to customers,” she says. “I am pleased to say demand is strong. I think people have come to see their homes as extremely important, and want to ensure their gas boiler is serviced, and they have the most efficient services.”

Her workers, she says, wear masks when visiting customers’ homes.  “They wore masks in any case before given the nature of the boilers they deal with,” she says. “They are provided with the right equipment and sanitise surfaces afterwards, as well as doing their work with customers not in the same room.

A six-fold increase in direct debit cancellations

Bord Gáis Energy is a bellwether for the Irish economy. Its spread of customers from ordinary homes to big business gives a good indication as to how things are going on in general in Ireland. I ask O’Kelly what she is seeing in terms of defaults. “It is early to comment on the default rate because we are still going through the billing cycles that relate to this period,” she says. “I can share that we saw up to a six-fold increase in direct debit cancellations from businesses at the peak of the concern around Covid-19. This was when businesses were going through the process of shutting down.”

O’Kelly says the challenge for Bord Gáis Energy is to help get these businesses back up and running – and alongside that to help its customers keep paying, despite the crisis.

“What is critical for us as we begin to get back to our normal pathway of ensuring full engagement with all of our customers is that they understand that there are options in terms of sustainable payment plans,” she says. 

Working from home, and working parents

When Catherine O’Kelly started work with Bord Gáis Energy, she was based in its headquarters at 1 Warrington Place in Dublin 2. Now almost all of her team are working from home. How has that been? “Well, there is always the potential now for two small children to walk into the office,” she laughs.

“In some respects, a huge silver lining of Covid-19 is the way the team has changed its way of working completely overnight as so many businesses have.

“We have put a huge emphasis, since we all left the office on Friday, March 13, on stepping up our communications to make sure we do everything we can to support our community and togetherness even though we are now working in 350 separate offices around the country.” Bord Gáis, she says, sent out daily circulars to its team and used Microsoft Teams to stay in touch.

“We have been able to use technology to adapt and collaborate and to keep the business running as it was before – and in some respects in a more agile manner –and that has been great to see,” she says.

“I do have some hope that it will help the flexibility agenda, which will only benefit the creation of a more diverse workplace.”

“There have been some things that we have done rapidly that we might never have thought was possible before. For example, in the first couple of weeks we enabled our contact centre agents to work from home,” she says.

Does O’Kelly believe the way we work will change long term post-Covid-19? “I absolutely do see a fundamental change,” she says. “There is clear feedback that many many people have taken a lot from this time and want to take advantage of flexibility in working. That isn’t the case for everybody. We have a close eye too on everybody who, for whatever personal reasons or business reasons, has a preference to get back into the office as soon as they can.”

Bord Gáis Energy, she says, would always require face-to-face collaboration but there was also the opportunity to give its people more options. “I am confident that we have seen a fundamental shift and that it is up to businesses like ourselves to take that opportunity to allow colleagues who want to work in a different way do so.”

O’Kelly is a member of the 30% Club in Ireland, which is aiming to ensure that a third of senior management in companies are female by the end of this year. She mentors a female leader, both within her own company, and outside it.

Will Covid-19 make that 30 per cent goal easier to achieve? “I think it will,” O’Kelly says. “I think it has been quite well understood for some time that having more flexibility supports working parents and that often, but not always, centres on working mothers.”

“What this huge experiment in having fully flexible working has done is give businesses the confidence that it works,” O’Kelly says. “And the people partaking in it can see as well that they can do the same great from home.

“I do have some hope that it will help the flexibility agenda which will only benefit the creation of a more diverse workplace.”

“I wanted to get to the people who ultimately made the final decisions”

Catherine O’Kelly

Catherine O’Kelly studied politics, philosophy and economics at the University of Oxford. It was a broad degree, and it is there she first developed her interest in energy and environmental economics. “I was really interested in the macro side of energy and how it underpins great geopolitical interactions and decisions – and also the micro side and how it affects us all as people in our homes,” she says.

“It was in university that I first became hugely interested in the sustainability and climate change side of things. I was studying it from an economics angle but even then, it was clear this was a huge challenge for our times and would need concerted action to address.”

After university, the next stop was management consulting with American firm Booz & Co, where she stayed from 2006 until 2011. “I worked in Asia, Africa and Europe from renewables to oil and gas and into utilities,” O’Kelly recalls. The move took her to the teeming city of Lagos, Nigeria, the oil capital of Africa. “It was really interesting to take some of the skills I had developed working for companies in London primarily and then applying them in a context where energy and the energy economy is really important.”

O’Kelly also worked in Jakarta, the capital of Indonesia. “I was working with a small team of people drawn from all over the world working on challenging questions. It was an unfamiliar situation for all of us, and it taught me the value of teamwork.”

O’Kelly came back to London in 2009, to work on secondment in the Carbon Trust. The trust is a non-profit set up by the British government, which is best known for launching the world’s first carbon footprint label for corporates. The trust works internationally, but O’Kelly was involved in working on Britain’s Green Investment Bank, which was set up to support renewable energy projects, as well as advising on low-carbon energy policy. 

“I realised then it was time for me to leave it as I wanted to get to the people who ultimately made the final decisions over the recommendations that a consultant might put forward,” O’Kelly says.

She joined Centrica in 2011 to get closer to where decisions were made. She spent four years as chief of staff reporting to the Centrica Group chief executive, before becoming director of industry development with British Gas where she worked on smart metering and other projects.

“I have seen a resounding agreement from all sides in the Brexit debate that it is critical that the interconnectedness between Great Britain and the island of Ireland continues.”

“Smart metering is something that is a very much a live topic in Ireland and we are putting a lot of work into it,” O’Kelly says. “When I was asked to become managing director of Bord Gáis Energy I absolutely jumped at the chance to move to Ireland.”

O’Kelly’s husband Ronan’s father is Irish, so she already had family here. She says she was especially interested in Ireland, because of where it was going. “Even going back to the publication of the climate action plan [in 2019], that is a very ambitious plan for Ireland, and personally and for Bord Gáis Energy we very much support it.”

O’Kelly says she believed the new government would bring Ireland another step forward again. 

Is cutting carbon emissions by 7 per cent annually each year until 2030 doable for Ireland? “Yes. I think for us it presents the opportunity to partner with our customers, whether residential or business, to help them become lower carbon producers,” O’Kelly says.

“I think it is an ambitious target but it is possible provided the right structures and help are put in place.”

“What is really important is to make it simple for people. To achieve the level of ambition set out, you need a lot of individual decision-makers to be making decisions in line with achieving that target,” she says.

 “What we were hearing all the last year is ‘I want to be part of this, I just don’t know where to start.’ I think that is where our opportunity comes in, which is to make it simple for customers.”

Last year, for example, O’Kelly says Bord Gáis had doubled installation numbers of its Hive hubs which allow customers to use less energy, using an app which controlled their energy use. “There is very much an appetite among people to change, but it is critical to bring our customers on the journey,” O’Kelly says.

Energy security, liquid gas and emissions

Energy security and supply is a big issue as Brexit inches forward. In May 2019, O’Kelly told The Irish Times Bord Gáis Energy might build a second power plant alongside its gas-fired electricity generating plant in Whitegate, Co Cork, which cost €400 million to build. Post-Covid-19 does O’Kelly still see this as a prospect? “I think what we needed then and what we still need is to make sure that we have enough supply to back up the demand from our customers,” O’Kelly says.

“There are a number of ways to build that out. One of those is to expand out our set of renewable power purchase agreements, which at the moment make up 20 per cent of the power we supply. But it is a growing proportion as we work on some more deals we have in the pipeline.”

As Ireland’s gas supplies in Kinsale and Corrib deplete, O’Kelly says this would become more important. So is another plant still on the agenda for Bord Gáis?

“That isn’t where we are looking at the moment. We are comfortable with the position we have at the moment but we are conscious of the changing energy mix and the need to keep matching that supply and demand.”

In June, the former chief executive of Bord Gáis, John Mullins, who now runs a renewables firm called Amarenco, says Ireland needed to build a liquified natural gas plant in Shannon to secure the gas supply and reduce reliance on the UK for supply post-Brexit. The LNG facility has been harshly criticised by the Green Party and actor Mark Ruffalo among others as it is likely to use fracked gas from America.

Does O’Kelly agree with Mullins, her predecessor? “I think what we would support is making sure that even while we have very ambitious targets for renewables, we still need a good and reliable base for load generation,” O’Kelly replies. “For which I would argue gas-fired power is the place for it to come from. We need to be careful about security of supply. There will be an increasing need for imported gas.”

“I wouldn’t say what exactly we need to do,” O’Kelly says diplomatically. “But we do need to take security of supply seriously. I would strongly argue gas is a fuel that will be needed in the medium term to enable the transition to a low-carbon economy.”

O’Kelly says Bord Gáis was watching Brexit closely. “I have seen a resounding agreement from all sides in the Brexit debate that it is critical that the interconnectedness between Great Britain and the island of Ireland continues,” she says. “This is a topic where there is resounding agreement.”

What about the ban on new exploration for gas in Ireland or developing Providence Resources’ prospect off the coast of Cork? “I think I would come back to the same argument as in the LNG debate, which is the important thing is that security of supply is taken very seriously. We have to make efforts to match the long-term demand for gas with the supply of where it is coming from. Kinsale is coming to an end. Corrib is declining. We have to be prepared to say that that needs to be met from somewhere.”

“I think that they [data centres] can be part of modernising and greening the energy mix. But it will take careful thought about the location of data centres.”

O’Kelly says Bord Gáis was supporting the growth of renewables in Ireland. “What we can do is provide a secure source of uptake of renewable energy which is where our power purchase agreements (with renewable energy makers) come in,” she says. “The other thing we need to be very conscious of is greening the gas grid itself.”

“We are involved in an early-stage feasibility study for carbon capture and storage off county Cork adjacent to our Whitegate power station and other gas assets in that area and I think that is a technology that needs to be explored.”

“Equally in terms of biomethane and hydrogen, we are exploring opportunities to inject that into the grid to decarbonise the gas grid itself, which is something which needs to be thought of in the medium and long term,” she says.

“Gas remains an important heating fuel and source of baseload power for those potential days when the wind isn’t blowing and the sun isn’t shining in Ireland.”

What about data centres? On the one hand, they create a demand for renewable energy, yet on the other, they require huge amounts of energy to keep going.

“They are certainly very significant in terms of projections of energy use coming from data centres. It is up to about 28 per cent by 2028,” she says. “It is very, very material. I think that they can be part of modernising and greening the energy mix. But it will take careful thought about the location of data centres.”

“Many of them are planned for the east of Ireland when the renewable power centres are often in the south and west,” O’Kelly says. “But I do see a genuine commitment to ensuring that as that new demand comes online from data centres, it has the greenest possible source of power behind it.”

The next step on the journey

In June, Bord Gáis Energy announced that Dave Kirwan was returning as managing director after a spell leading Centrica’s customer operations in Britain. O’Kelly says: “The challenges we have in the immediate term is to continue our recovery from the impact of Covid.

“We also need to capitalise on the opportunities… There is a great opportunity to continue to orientate our business to be part of supporting the shift to a sustainable low-carbon economy and make sure we are at the forefront in our customers’ minds when they are looking for a partner in becoming more sustainable themselves.”

What is next for O’Kelly? “I have maternity leave in September and then I will return to Centrica UK in 2021 and I will be a part of the leadership team there… exact details yet to be announced!” O’Kelly will move back to London as a result.

“We will miss Ireland enormously as a family. It was a wonderful place to live and a very positive place to do business. There is a shared interest in the success of Ireland, which enables a good dialogue between people from different companies or sectors. That is something hugely positive and something I have learned from.”

O’Kelly says relaunching her company’s website and investing in digitisation were among the achievements that made her proudest. Investing in the back-end of its technology has allowed it to launch a new loyalty price scheme, giving 5 per cent off of bills to customers who stayed with it for three years.

The business has also invested in smart energy products for both residential and commercial customers. “Making those investments have made things simpler for our customers to point in the sustainability direction,” she says. O’Kelly says she is proudest of Bord Gáis Energy’s reaction to the Covid-19 crisis.

“Everything that has been achieved has been a team effort,” she says. “It shows the culture of problem-solving and pitching in that we have in Bord Gáis Energy. Everybody just dived in to keep the show on the road as an essential service. We provided the continuity to keep the lights on. Everything that has happened has strengthened the culture and the team. It gives me a lot of confidence in the future.”