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“I’m determined that there will be a supergrid for offshore wind power. There has to be a solution that enables us to decarbonise at scale, and save the planet from overheating. This is something that has driven me since 1989, when I first became aware of the challenge posed by climate change. It will be hard work, but I’ve never baulked at that. It will be done because it has to be done.”
Entrepreneur Eddie O’Connor speaks with passion, humour, and conviction – underpinned by a steely resolve – on a two-hour phone call from his office in Nova UCD, the university’s research and innovation hub.
He uses a phrase a few times during our conversation that will ring true with many founders and CEOs, emphasising how they “live in the future.”
In the context of climate change and the need to embrace renewable energy and the supergrid – a green industrial revolution – as part of the EU Green Deal, another line that resonates is: “History is rushing at us, but we’re in a race to the future.”
At times, there’s a hint of impatience in his voice. He has a mission, and he’s keen to get things done. “I think this is the longest interview I’ve ever done with a journalist,” he laughs at one stage.
He’s renowned in his industry for being something of a visionary, and an innovator. He has employed a memorable turn of phrase in numerous speeches. He is also writing a book about his life, and his thoughts on climate change and renewable energy.
Other peers who have also spent several decades in the sector regard him as politically shrewd, and having a somewhat autocratic style at times. Those who recall his history at Bord na Móna especially. He made the semi-state firm profitable by making unpopular redundancies, all of which were voluntary, but also turning it around and running it efficiently, saving it from extinction.
To go back over his time in that role might make the interview twice as long as it is. To summarise what happened, he was hounded out of the job in 1996 after publicly criticising politicians (there was a rainbow coalition government at the time of FG, Democratic Left, and Labour) and civil servants for failing to back his plans to reinvent Bord na Móna as a renewable energy business.
Details of his unvouched expenses – which by today’s political standards were pretty modest – were leaked to a newspaper. A political storm ensued, the civil service wanted his head, Energy Minister Michael Lowry came under pressure, and O’Connor had to resign.
Reflecting on that time, he says: “A report that was done by one of the Big Four accountancy firms found that because of the changes I had made, the firm had an IR£2 billion enterprise value when I left.
“I reduced the wage bill by about 40 per cent, from 4,200 staff, down to 2,400. There were three new power stations coming on stream, and a line of products was on sale. I had also secured forgiveness from the government of a IR£200 million debt overhang.”
To look at his success elsewhere to date, you’d have to say he has had the last laugh in any case. Arguably Ireland’s most successful founder in the industry – of Airtricity and then Mainstream Renewable Power – he describes at length the technical challenge that his third startup, SuperNode, is tackling.
He explains that there is also a significant lobbying and public affairs effort under way, something which he began in 2008 with an organisation called Friends of the Supergrid.
He also speaks of his fears that without sufficient political will, and a minister overseeing the marshalling of state resources such as the IDA behind the initiative, Ireland may not sufficiently grasp the opportunity that lies ahead to develop both the offshore power grid which he calls the supergrid, and our substantial wind power resources.
Between 30GW and 75GW of offshore wind power, using floating turbines rather than ones sitting on the seabed, could be exported to Europe from the west and south-west coast, he believes. To put the potential into perspective, electricity consumption here peaks at about 5GW.
But Europe will need up to 900GW, O’Connor says. Electric vehicles and electric-powered heating will result in increasing demand over the next 30 years, and it has to be powered by renewables.
There will be competition in Europe – from Spain, Portugal and others – as they clamour to develop their own offshore wind energy. Ireland’s opportunity would involve investment of between €45bn and €150bn, generating up to €21bn a year in revenues from the electricity produced.
From that, the State would receive up to €530m a year in licensing and rental fees, plus further exchequer returns from employment and corporate profits from it and spin-off economic activity, he claims.
“I got people to back me, and they made out like bandits.”
O’Connor also talks about his approach to leadership and management. He adds that despite winning a student council election by a landslide at UCD, he decided politics wouldn’t be for him. “I just wanted to do other things.” Broadcaster Pat Kenny was a contemporary of his in chemical engineering studies, graduating a year ahead of him in 1969.
Their alma mater’s professor of chemical engineering, the late John O’Donnell wrote on O’Connor’s undergraduate record that he “should do well – with experience.”
Prof O’Donnell wasn’t wrong. After a career in the ESB in the 1970s and then Bord na Móna in the 1980s, the entrepreneur became aware of the potential of wind power in 1994.
He first found success with Airtricity, focusing on the UK and the US. It created the most millionaires in Irish corporate history when it was sold to SSE for €1.8 billion in 2008. “I got people to back me, and they made out like bandits,” O’Connor proffers.
With his second venture, Mainstream Renewable Power, possibly valued at as much as €1 billion by prospective suitors and equity partners over the past year, he may land a payday of as much as €550 million in the coming weeks for his 55 per cent stake. Not that there’s any sense that he’s motivated by wealth. He is thought to have made about €45 million from Airtricity, and recycled €30 million of that into Mainstream.
Advisers Rothschild have spent the past year assessing and evaluating Mainstream’s business and then flushing out bids. A company spokesman recently told The Irish Times that it expects the process to be completed in the first quarter of this year.
O’Connor declines to comment on the process. Oil and gas firms were initially thought to be in the running, but they may have since dropped out of the process.
Shell and Total both bought French wind power firms in the past year. Oil and gas giant BP, headed up by Kerryman – and fellow engineer and UCD graduate – Bernard Looney formed a strategic partnership for US offshore wind with Norway’s Equinor in September.
That month, when we spoke, O’Connor was critical of fossil fuel companies and their promotion of hydrogen as a fuel. I asked him at the time if this implied that he ruled out doing any sort of a deal with any such firms, but he didn’t comment either way.
Hydrogen isn’t a helpful solution to climate change, he explained. It can’t be piped in conventional pipelines to heat homes. ‘Blue hydrogen’ that’s promoted is 95 per cent natural gas, and only 5 per cent hydrogen. Producing hydrogen from wind power to then fuel vehicles is proven to result in two orders of efficiency losses when compared to using wind power to charge electric vehicles, he maintains.
Norwegian renewable energy giant Statkraft might be a more likely fit for Mainstream. The firm previously bought Element Power here and more recently acquired five solar power projects in September, also picking up some wind projects in August. Other potential suitors would include utilities or financial players in private equity, however.
“We might find a way to do an IPO in the future”
There was talk from around 2018 about whether Mainstream might go public, but what transpired was that a grey market facility for private investors was set up in 2017, and then again in 2019.
2018 was a record year for Mainstream, with a €487.5 million profit, then last year that dropped to €19.4 million. An €800 million sale of three offshore wind farms – one in Scotland, Neart na Gaoithe, for €665 million to EDF – proved instrumental. Mainstream had invested €50 million of equity into the venture. The windfall enabled investors to take back their equity in the firm by paying back debt and buying back shares held by Barclays, Macquarie, and Japanese trading outfit Marubeni.
“Our cash flows are lumpy in that respect, and that makes it difficult from the point of view of an IPO, which is why we didn’t go for it,” O’Connor says.
“But I believe we will find a way to do it in the future. It might take several years, but by then the company would be in a different shape,” he adds guardedly.
He was a reluctant seller of Airtricity in 2008. He had hoped to stage a management buyout with the right financial backer and continue growing the firm. In that sense, there’s always a chance that the road ahead for Mainstream will be different to anything suggested above.
A bump in the road that occurred in August was CEO Andy Kinsella’s departure because of a legal dispute. A mediation process is under way and O’Connor declines to comment on the matter. Former CFO Mary Quaney, who is highly regarded as a safe pair of hands, took Kinsella’s place. SuperNode passed a significant milestone in early December, and was given a statement of feasibility for its concept of a subsea superconductive cable system that aims to halve the cost of transmitting electricity from wind turbines off Ireland’s west coast to Europe.
DNVGL, the world’s leading marine and energy technology certification, risk and quality assessment body, conducted a detailed technical examination of both its technology concept and technology development programme.
The firm is at technology readiness level (TRL) 2, he says. There are nine levels in all to develop a new technology. The next 12 months will see his team – which is led by CEO John Fitzgerald, a former grid development director of Eirgrid and project director of the East West Interconnector – develop its scale prototype and continue improving the design of the SuperNode tech.
It recently launched a collaboration jointly funded by the company and Science Foundation Ireland, through UCC’s MaREI marine research institute, that will create five new posts. Its focus will be on improving the performance of SuperNode’s subsea superconducting cable system design, and building of a set of test facilities for the system.
This team will test physical prototypes to determine their suitability for subsea operation, using a range of numerical modelling and physical testing activities.
“You don’t know the right answer. In the beginning, you thrash around in the dark.”
“At the very beginning of this, we spent a long time defining exactly what our task is. The more time you devote to that, the clearer you are about what has to be done,” O’Connor says.
“John likes innovating, which is important. You need to actually enjoy it, and have a feel for it. That’s not true of every engineer. He’s probably in the minority in that regard.
“To innovate, you need people working closely together, drinking coffee, maybe even getting drunk together occasionally. But sparking off one another, creating ideas, and trying things out.
“It’s messy, because you don’t know what the right answer is. In the beginning, you thrash around in the dark. But there’s nothing wrong with that. Technical confusion is part of learning. But then you have to get out of your comfort zone and just experiment.
“We’re not smashing the atom or sending a rocket to the moon. But we will put together everything we learn, and have a product that is quite innovative – yes, disruptive, even. This is going to be the Tesla or the Amazon of the electricity transmission business.
“By the time we get to TRL 6, we will have a product, but that might take us to 2025. We would like some government or EU innovation funding, but it’s only semi-fundamental. When we begin rolling out prototypes, it gets expensive,” O’Connor says. The 73 year-old is in this for the long-haul, having first conceived of the idea of a European supergrid in 2001.
He and a group of friends have put €2.5 million into SuperNode to date. He will reinvest some of his proceeds from Mainstream, in a round of about €10 million in the coming months. It might cost €70 million to get to a working prototype, he estimates.
The vision is to build a pan-European grid for wind and solar power from Ireland in the west, to Scandinavia in the north, Iberia in the south – and even possibly into Moroccan and Algerian solar resources – and as far east as Romania and Bulgaria.
Although he has namechecked Tesla and Amazon, I put it to him that the technical challenge of superconductivity is in a way similar to Elon Musk’s Hyperloop technology. It aims to transport passengers in pods through vacuum tubes at speeds of up to 760mph.
If anything, SuperNode’s technology may be more complex, involving sending electrons through tiny conductors that are thinner than human hair in a vacuum tube surrounded by supercooled liquid nitrogen at -200°C, all encased in a subsea cable.
The fundamental challenge, O’Connor says, is that every 100km, the nitrogen begins to turn from liquid into gas. It would need perhaps six pumping stations between here and France to turn it back into liquid.
Some would also have busbars – platforms or hubs that send power from a group of turbines down these cables, either on to the next one or onshore. Ones in the North Sea using existing designs, HVDC (high voltage direct current) technology, and with a maximum 1GW capacity, can cost up to €800 million to build while lower capacity medium voltage cables require more onshore connections. SuperNode’s will be vastly cheaper, and much more compact, he claims.
“Superconductivity is currently used in small applications, in Seoul, Chicago, and Essen, in Germany. I visited Seoul last year, but they’re only using it in a 1.2km long application. In each city, they’re using it to carry power in dense city locations where there isn’t room for the sub-station and thick conventional cables that would otherwise be needed.
“The challenge we have with SuperNode is finding the right combination of types of materials. These days you can dial up the properties that you want in something using different materials and various liquid crystals until you have something that can maintain a vacuum, which acts as a barrier to heat transfer,” he explains.
With the €1 trillion EU Green Deal, and a growing momentum behind a green recovery, there’s a sense that the supergrid’s time has come.
Despite Brexit, there is interest in Britain in participating in the project – with the new British ambassador recently penning a column stating that in The Irish Times. The track records of Airtricity and Mainstream in the north-east of England are highly respected.
Wind power is breaking records in Britain for the proportion of renewables powering its national grid, with 60 per cent achieved in August, and 40 per cent on December 18.
Meanwhile, our Climate Minister Eamon Ryan has recently talked up the need for the supergrid. But consultants such as Gavin & Doherty Geosolutions are beginning to highlight deficiencies at state level with regard to the need for an integrated approach involving the development of ports such as Foynes on the Shannon, and investment in related R&D.
O’Connor also believes that the IDA and Enterprise Ireland at the very least need to alter their missions to facilitate the opportunities provided by the development of offshore wind power and the supergrid.
“Ireland does US foreign direct investment (FDI) and that’s it. The IDA has grown on the back of that, and it’s served us well for the past 30 or 40 years. Ireland has to get out of its comfort zone. If we want manufacturing to come here, we are going to have to prioritise it.
“The state needs to listen to the private sector and alter our industrial policy to guard against an uncertain future. There are going to be winners and losers, and we need to ask how we can be winners.
“No one is going to give it to us. Other countries want their share and feel entitled to it. We are going to have to work bloody hard for it. And we will need the supergrid.
“Britain faced up to this, its government was determined, and they capitalised on their opportunity. And we [Airtricity and then Mainstream] were the leading North Sea offshore wind developers.
“But wind turbine manufacturers look at Ireland and see a great big nothing. Well OK, they see the first installation of the Arklow bank, which Airtricity built 16 years ago, but nothing since then.”
A country that’s more balanced
I ask O’Connor to imagine if Ireland did everything right in seizing the offshore wind opportunity: how different might the country look?
“First of all, on a basic level just to talk about the wind turbine blades. A 20MW one could be 230 metres in diameter, and the length of Croke Park is 160 metres. The bigger you go, the more carbon fibres it needs.
“Think about how the wing on the Airbus or Boeing you last flew on flexes when it takes off. On one of their larger aircraft, a 787 Dreamliner or the latest Airbus A350, it might flex by three or four metres. Wind turbine blades do that too.
“But we could see the west and the south-west of the country, around Co Kerry, reimagined, and certainly around the ports for example, rebuilt. It would have a much higher population. None of this would be built before 2030, however. That’s just not possible.
“But if you fast forward to 2050, we’d have the supergrid in place. We’d have 1.1 jobs created for every megawatt (1MW) of installed capacity, so perhaps 30,000 jobs for our 30GW, and we’d be looking at building another 40GW.
“It could alter the nature of politics here, because we’d have a more industrial country. One that knows how to invent [products that we can manufacture]. That’s something we haven’t done enough previously. If we want to realise this future, we have to invent, and not just incremental, small stuff.
“Our universities might become more specialised in this area. Our ports – Foynes, Cork, and Galway or Killybegs – would be developed. The cities in these regions would have grown. They’d have thriving communities. We could have a country that’s more balanced. It wouldn’t all be about growth and jobs in Dublin.
“We sometimes think of ourselves as the island of saints and scholars. There’s nothing wrong with that at all. But I’d like to think that we’re an island that preserved the best parts of our culture from times gone by, but that we also knew how to do industrial development at a profound level that isn’t all about US foreign direct investment.”
How realistic are jobs numbers?
To put the jobs numbers into context, arguably Britain has yet to realise the notional 1.1 jobs for every 1MW of installed wind power. It has 10.5GW of installed capacity in the North Sea, which is expected to increase to 27.5GW by 2026. Yet in Hull and Grimsby, Siemens Gamesa only employs 2,000 people making turbine blades – roles for which it had 28,000 applications.
In November, GE was said to be in talks about creating up to 3,000 jobs building wind turbines along the same north-east English coast, according to the Financial Times, (which also said some components for them are made elsewhere and imported), with an initial 240 announced in September in operations and maintenance roles, according to local media reports.
The only other wind turbine factory in Britain is run by Vestas on the Isle of Wight, employing about 1,100 people directly and indirectly. It therefore seems optimistic to suggest that the west and south-west of Ireland will see 30,000 jobs created (based on 30GW of wind installed) if Britain has about 6,000 at the most, assuming the GE jobs actually materialise.
To begin with, 30GW of Irish offshore wind would require 1,500 20MW turbines. If that is expanded to 75GW, that’s a further 2,250 20MW ones. Once these are produced, Ireland either has to export more, or the factory is reduced to a maintenance function – and that’s if Ireland isn’t too expensive a place to manufacture in the first place.
Britain’s business department told The Times in November that it expected UK firms to receive only a 50 per cent share of £50bn of the capital expenditure on turbines and equipment for its North Sea wind farms by 2030.
Other roles could be in building ships to lay cables, install the turbines, supernodes and carry equipment and installation and maintenance crews. O’Connor is perhaps more realistic about Ireland’s prospects here.
“We will need a shipping partner who will design these – a marine architect who will sell or licence a design, and the ships will probably be built somewhere in Asia – but that’s not certain. It’s difficult to make money in shipping. It’s an area I might have otherwise gone into, if I hadn’t gone into wind energy and now SuperNode,” he says.
“It’s not possible to make wave or perhaps even tidal power economic, but it’s also not necessary.”
Speaking of oceans, has Mainstream ever looked at wave or tidal energy, given our ocean resources?
There are actually a number of former Openhydro engineers working for SuperNode, O’Connor reveals. After France’s Naval Energies – formerly DCNS – took a controlling stake in 2011 in the tidal power firm founded by Brendan Gilmore and Donal O’Flynn, it spent seven years developing its tidal turbine technology before going bust in 2018.
“A friend of mine, Martin McAdam, who ran Airtricity’s US operations, developed the Oyster wave energy converter, but he couldn’t make it work. Other friends of mine went into the sector too, but it’s just too difficult.
“Water is 1,000 times denser than air, and it can do a lot of damage. It’s too technically difficult. Waves and tides aren’t mathematically predictable. What you forecast might be a 50-year monster wave might hit you every 18 months.
“If you don’t get your equipment out of the water in time, it gets destroyed. Tidal, on the seabed, might work eventually, but nothing compares to solar and wind when it comes to the cost.
“In my view, bad ownership sunk Openhydro. What happened was not the engineers’ fault. There’s an old adage about choosing between a bad owner and a bad manager. You can get rid of a bad manager, but you’re stuck with a bad owner.
“My experience in renewable energy tells me that not only is it not possible to make wave power work, nor probably tidal, in the medium term. But it’s also not necessary, because solar and wind will generate enough power.”
No green transition without transmission
Former RTÉ journalist, MEP and presidential candidate Pat Cox chairs SuperNode and also heads up the lobbying effort for the supergrid. Given that O’Connor formulated the idea in 2001, this is a race that is slow and steady.
It’s perhaps no wonder, then, that the entrepreneur is impatient. Yet the obstacles may peel away if there is a fair political wind behind the concept as a result of the EU Green Deal.
Alternatively, the idea may run into the chasm that exists between the grand idea of the EU as an alliance of nations and the realpolitik of internal politics and vested interests within the individual nations. It may prove to be a test of whether the EU can become a single market in areas that have so far been off limits.
“Admittedly, Europe may not be ready for the supergrid. The political challenge is every bit as big as the technical challenge,” O’Connor explains, outlining a number of issues that need to be dealt with.
There has to be free movement of electricity throughout Europe, and a single coordinator of power transmission that coordinates each country’s transmission system operator (TSO) [Eirgrid and its European equivalents].
There needs to be an overall planning authority to plan the construction of the grid.
There needs to be a European regulator to protect consumers and ensure its rules are adhered to. The private sector needs to be allowed to enter the electricity transmission sector.
“European TSOs are among the least innovative companies in the world. Their mantra of ‘keep the lights on’ has stifled innovation for the past 20 years,” he argues.
“The supergrid will be done by the private sector or not at all. But the right policy environment has to be created for it. The private sector is efficient, has to make a profit, and has to get it right every time.
“Then you have the public sector that’s preoccupied with not getting it wrong, so as to protect politicians. There’s a gulf there between their thinking. We have to recognise one another’s strengths and weaknesses.
“I saw this in my ESB [where he was a purchasing manager], and then Bord na Móna [where he was CEO for nine years] days. We had to get it right all the time, and never wrong. Yet if the ESB didn’t exist today, you wouldn’t set it up. What they do can be done more cheaply by a fully private company, rather than a semi-state one.
“In my Airtricity days, we had to lobby the Dáil to bring in the electricity regulation act (1999) . Without the EC Directive 96/92, which opened the European generation and supply market to the private sector, there would have been no wind power in Ireland.”
R&D money needs to be allocated at national and European Commission level to help finance the development of the next generation of cables, platforms and busbars for the supergrid as well, he adds.
“We are looking ahead to the UN Climate Change Conference, COP 26 in Glasgow later this year, and we’ll be running a very important conference that will address some of these issues in UCD in preparation for it.”
“Respect people. Challenge them. Treasure their ideas”
Mainstream’s website features a comprehensive dashboard of its solar and wind assets and its track record. It has sold 4.3GW of assets and has three times that amount, 12.33GW, either owned and operated, under construction (1.6GW) or in development (9.77GW).
They span several continents, from Chile, Canada, and the US, to South Africa, Ghana, Egypt, and Senegal, plus Vietnam, and the Philippines, and Scotland, England, and Ireland.
What does it take to build a successful €1.8 billion business, Airtricity; a second, perhaps billion-euro one, Mainstream; and then start all over again on a third venture, SuperNode?
“I took some guidance from a psychologist called Sean Brophy, and we built Airtricity and Mainstream around a set of values. It starts with respect. If someone has been doing a job for five or more years, they probably know how to do that job better than anybody else. If you want them to change, you start from that point.
“Let them know you want to help them do the job better, and ask how are we going to do that together, in a spirit of collaboration. They want a leader who respects and responds to them. Their jobs are at stake. They want to know their ideas are sought, and more than that, treasured actually.
“At both Airtricity, and more recently Mainstream, which employs 260 staff, we were ranked as the best place to work by the Great Place to Work organisation. It’s a rare achievement, but we ranked around 90 per cent in their surveys, which looked at areas such as employee engagement.
“People also want someone to level with them. At Bord na Móna, I was honest and explained that the organisation was shagged unless some of them took a redundancy package. They respected that.
“You also challenge people. Emphasise the need to be competitive, and encourage them to be at their best. Working hard is a sine qua non. At Airtricity I used to be first in and last out. If your staff look at you and see you dossing, that’s not going to work. People also expect you not to ask them to do something that you wouldn’t do yourself.
“Authenticity in leadership is important. I recall a survey of CEOs about 10 years ago, assessing if they were leaders or followers, and it found that 75 per cent were followers. That suggests there are very few true leaders.
“You need to lead with the right strategy. That’s the most important decision you’ll make. Having good operations and being a bit more efficient than a rival isn’t enough in the long term to maintain a competitive advantage.
“Look at how IBM has reinvented itself several times now. Great companies like that have great strategists. You need to see where the future is, and back yourself.
“You also have to keep in mind that you’ll never know as much as the people reporting to you. But they have to know as well that you will spot something like a flawed argument they might have.
“I worked on the basis that for every management layer between you and your staff on the frontline, 50 per cent of the truth got absorbed. So in order to be a good leader, you have to walk around a lot or talk to your staff on the frontline. In our Covid age, that’s probably a lot of Teams or Zoom calls instead of walking around. But that’s how you find out what’s really happening, and it cuts out the bullshit.”
O’Connor also believes that it’s important not to be a workaholic. “I don’t work at weekends ideally. It’s important to stay creative and fresh of mind. Turn off from work completely and let your subconscious work out solutions to your problems.”
Since he was in his 20s, he has also taken a nap for half an hour in the afternoons. “In 30 years as a CEO across three organisations, it’s always involved hard work, needing to stay competitive, and at times it was pretty stressful. My naps and not working at weekends helped me to deal with that.”
“I never saw myself as setting up a family firm.”
Outside of work, O’Connor enjoys a variety of hobbies and spending time with his wife, children, and five grandchildren. Daughter Lesley, a Trinity College graduate who also has an MBA from the IE Business School in Madrid, is a non-executive director of Mainstream and its group insurance manager.
Son Rob is chief commercial officer at SuperNode, with an engineering degree under his belt as well as an MBA from the same alma mater as his sister. “Despite how it might look, I don’t do nepotism,” O’Connor laughs.
“Lesley found her own way. If they’re good enough, they’ll get to the top. But they’ll have to do it under their own steam. I won’t be making a special case for them. I never saw myself as setting up a family firm.”
O’Connor’s childhood was spent in Elphin, Co Roscommon. He says he inherited his father’s intellectual curiosity and work ethic, and the rest of his personality from his mother. His father Bob was a professor of agricultural economics who conducted Ireland’s first comprehensive land survey. He was still writing reports for the ESRI when he passed away at the age of 80.
Besides his ambitions in business, O’Connor also has a long-held one to buy a vineyard somewhere in Europe. He collects wine, and has a cellar of over 1,000 bottles. He plays golf regularly and works out in the gym several times a week.
“If I had more time, I’d spend it fishing,” he says. There’s a photo in his office of him holding a 6ft 6in tope shark he caught in the sea off Wicklow. He also enjoys fly fishing, and has fished many of the western loughs such as Mask and Corrib.The pandemic meant he had to cancel a fishing trip to South America.
Travel for work is something he enjoyed pre-Covid. As soon as it’s safe to do so, he’s adamant that Teams or Zoom calls won’t replace all of his work trips, as he enjoys flying. He’s greener when it comes to his choice of car, driving the latest Audi E-tron electric SUV, while his wife has a smaller electric BMW.
He’s also a prolific reader, having recently read The Man Who Changed China, a biography of former Chinese leader Jiang Zemin written by a former adviser to the Chinese government, Robert Lawrence Kuhn.
*****
At one point midway through our conversation, O’Connor referred to the exploits of Hannibal, the renowned military tactician who led the forces of Carthage against the Romans.
In recent years, O’Connor had ambitions to help electrify Africa, and made a few speeches on “A Marshall Plan for Africa” in London and the RDS. Others in the industry have had similar aims in the past. An initiative called Desertec to develop renewable power on the continent folded in 2014.
He had planned to start by establishing a research institute, and did some preliminary work with Germany’s Development Minister Gerd Muller. He has since lowered his sights, however, satisfied with the impact that Mainstream’s wind and solar developments in South Africa, Ghana, and Senegal are making.
On climate change, he’s adamant that there is now sufficient political will to tackle the issue. He’s a fan of Sweden’s Greta Thunberg, and positive about the renewed impetus a Biden administration in the US will give to the issue.
“If I thought the political will wasn’t there, as well as in relation to offshore wind and the supergrid, I’d probably throw in my hat, retire, and start drinking all my wine,” he laughs.
Further reading
Amazon’s data centres will need more power than a million Irish homes – but where from?
A €150m lightbulb moment: shining light on Amarenco’s solar business
