Richard is passionate about our global society’s transition to a low-carbon world, and counts himself fortunate to be among those working hard to hasten that transition. Richard’s expertise lies at the intersection of energy, enterprise, and finance.
Richard completed the Global Energy MBA at Warwick Business School in 2014. His dissertation focused on Green Infrastructure Finance and the securitisation of energy efficiency and distributed generation projects.
After graduation, Richard contracted to Pure Leapfrog, a UK-based charity focused on developing the community energy sector, to establish a £15m social impact fund investing in large-scale community-owned renewable energy infrastructure, going on to establish it’s award-winning trading subsidiary Leapfrog Finance and become its managing director. Big Society Capital invested to establish the fund, and subsequently increased its investment to £30m. The fund assisted communities finance the construction or acquisition of over 23MW of ground-mount solar in the UK, which is forecast to generate over £7m of community benefit over the life of the assets, and save over 100kt of carbon emissions.
Richard’s career began when he graduated from the University of Limerick in 1996 with an honours degree in Industrial Chemistry. While still an undergrad he secured a year of experience with Loctite R&D (now Henkel) in Ireland and the US in product and process development. After graduation he spent two years in Taiwan as a product and process development engineer with an American electronics firm, General Semiconductor (now Vishay). While there he participated in the development of several electronic products, successfully introduced several new manufacturing processes, and developed an integrated data-management system to streamline the development process. He then spent a year at the Swiss Polytechnic EPFL carrying out research into Solid Oxide Fuel Cells.
In 2000 Richard co-founded Kinematik and became its CEO. Kinematik was successfully selected to participate in a business incubation programme sponsored by Cork BIC and went on to win the ‘Most Innovative New Product’ award sponsored by Ernst & Young. Kinematik subsequently raised substantial seed capital in 2001 and launched its product, eNovator, in 2002 and secured its first major pharmaceutical customer in the US later that year.
In 2004 Richard successfully exited Kinematik and became an independent consultant specialising in technology commercialisation and start-up fundraising, based primarily in New York. Since 2005 he has shifted his focus from the life sciences and IT back into energy, gaining a masters in sustainable energy from University College Cork (2007), and a masters in environmental policy from the London School of Economics (2008).
In 2010 Richard joined EnerNOC [NASDAQ:ENOC], the global leader in demand response and energy intelligence software, in a business development role with its UK team. Richard successfully enrolled several MW’s of load into National Grid’s STOR programme from various industrial and public sector sites, primarily hospitals.
In 2012 Richard joined MITIE Asset Management (MAM), then a division of MITIE[FTSE:MTO], a FTSE250 strategic outsourcing and integrated facilities management company, again in a business development role. MITIE’s Asset Management division was set up to develop ESCo’s (Energy Services Company) in the UK and Richard was brought on board to develop the industrial sector following his experience at EnerNOC. He targeted large industrial sites consuming in excess of 2MW of power and heat (each) and offered to supply heat and power (cogeneration) on a performance basis by funding, designing, building, and operating, energy assets on or near the client’s site.