Here Brian shares more about his role and what it’s been like starting at a new company during the COVID-19 pandemic.
What is your role at Ovida?
I’m the New Markets and Innovation Manager here at Ovida, which means I look after the group business development into three key areas of large commercial solar, microgrids and stand-alone power systems. I’m just part of a broader team that has tremendous knowledge of private energy infrastructure, of delivering utility scale power purchase agreements, experience in Europe’s growing renewables and microgrids and consulting around research and development. We’re here to meet our customer needs for energy solutions and make the transition to, or further growth into, renewables as easy as possible.
What is your background and experience?
I’ve worked in publishing, IT, media and telecommunications, but for the last ten years I’ve been leading teams in energy businesses across retail, operations, IT programs and most recently leading energy solutions innovation. It is in the energy solutions environment that I’ve had the pleasure to work with many customers, organisations and people who are as interested in energy markets as I am. In the last five years much of my time has been working with emerging technologies, start-ups and innovation, which means I’ve had the opportunity to deliver a wide range of energy solutions from customer energy portals, demand response and flexibility, commercial batteries, solar, lighting, power factor correction and virtual power plants. So it’s great to be able to leverage this experience in this role with Ovida.
What has it been like starting at a new company during COVID-19?
Starting during the COVID pandemic has been a unique experience! I’ve spent less than a day in the office since starting at Ovida and have only met most of the team online. While it’s been unusual, the team and organisation have been great in helping me settle in and my team in particular have leveraged all their experience in everything we’ve done over the last few months to deliver some really exciting solutions for our customers. So despite the physical distance of the pandemic, we’re still creating and selling solutions and so it’s still been an engaging and rewarding time to start.
What are you most passionate about?
The Australian energy market has been an incredibly dynamic industry to work in and I’ve loved bringing new energy solutions to market, or thinking differently about already established technology being used today. The opportunity to collaborate with incredibly knowledgeable and driven people across diverse organisations is so rewarding and I’m really fortunate to be able to continue working with customers and our teams to get renewable energy solutions in market and potentially find a market for some of the great new technologies that are being developed at the moment. The team also have this incredible breadth of experience and I love being able to bring this knowledge to our customers and to help formulate strategies to further the growth of renewable energy!
How can Ovida play a part?
Ovida is a unique energy solutions organisation in that our model is to own and operate the solutions we deploy for our customers whether in front of or behind-the-meter. Whether it is delivering new solar, batteries or private energy infrastructure or buying back customer assets, our aim is to provide our customers with a complete energy service; not just to walk away once the system is in place but to really ensure we provide reliable and well maintained solutions. It is this Energy as a Service offering that is the core of what we do. We feel we are in a great place to be able to deliver this to customers by drawing upon the capability and experience of our teams. We can bring access to a diverse portfolio of solutions and organisations for our customers and package them up in a way that suits the commercial needs of the organisation, and where they have confidence we’ll back these solutions for the long term. I think this is great for customers.
