Kadri Simson is the European commissioner for energy, a position she has held since December 2019. She previously held the position of minister of economics affairs and infrastructure of the Republic of Estonia from 2016 to 2019. During the Estonian presidency of the council of the EU (from July to December 2017), Simson chaired both the meetings of the energy ministers and transport ministers in the transport, telecommunications and energy (TTE) council as well as the meeting of economy ministers in the EU competitiveness council. From 2007 to 2016, she was a member of the Estonian Parliament (“Riigikogu”) and was re-elected in 2019. Simson has a degree in history at the University of Tartu and holds a master’s degree in political science from the University College London.

Mary Therese Winifred Robinson, is an Irish Independent politician who served as the seventh President of Ireland, becoming the first woman to hold this office. She also served as United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights from 1997 to 2002 and a Senator for the University of Dublin from 1969 to 1989. She first rose to prominence as an academic, barrister and campaigner. In the 1990 presidential election she became the first Independent candidate nominated by the Labor Party, the Workers’ Party and Independent Senators.

She is widely regarded as a transformative figure for Ireland, and for the Irish presidency, revitalizing and liberalizing a previously conservative, low-profile political office. She resigned the presidency two months ahead of the end of her term of office to take up her post in the United Nations. During her UN tenure she visited Tibet (1998), the first High Commissioner to do so; she criticised Ireland’s immigrant policy; and the use of capital punishment in the United States. She extended her intended single four-year term by a year to preside over the World Conference against Racism 2001 in Durban, South Africa; the conference proved controversial.

After leaving the UN in 2002, Robinson formed Realizing Rights: the Ethical Globalization Initiative, which came to a planned end at the end of 2010. Its core activities were 1) fostering equitable trade and decent work, 2) promoting the right to health and more humane migration policies, and 3) working to strengthen women’s leadership and encourage corporate social responsibility. The organisation also supported capacity building and good governance in developing countries. Mary Robinson returned to live in Ireland at the end of 2010, and has set up The Mary Robinson Foundation – Climate Justice, which aims to be ‘a center for thought leadership, education and advocacy on the struggle to secure global justice for those many victims of climate change who are usually forgotten – the poor, the disempowered and the marginalised across the world.’

Mary Robinson is Chairman of the Institute for Human Rights and Business and Chancellor of the University of Dublin. Since 2004, she has also been Professor of Practice in International Affairs at Columbia University, where she teaches international human rights. Mary also visits other colleges and universities where she lectures on human rights. She also sits on the board of the Mo Ibrahim Foundation, an organisation which supports good governance and great leadership in Africa and is a member of the Foundation’s Ibrahim Prize Committee. As well, she is an Extraordinary Professor in the Centre for Human Rights and the Centre for Sexualities, AIDS and Gender at the University of Pretoria. Since 2005 she is honorary president of the European Inter-University Centre for Human Rights and Democratisation EIUC. In addition, she is Chairman of the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) and a founding member and chairman of the Council of Women World Leaders.

In 2004, she received Amnesty International’s Ambassador of Conscience Award for her work in promoting human rights.

Dr. Steven Chu is an American physicist and a former government official. He is known for his research at Bell Labs and Stanford University regarding the cooling and trapping of atoms with laser light, for which he won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1997, along with his scientific colleagues Claude Cohen-Tannoudji and William Daniel Phillips.

Dr. Chu served as the 12th United States Secretary of Energy from 2009 to 2013 in the administration of U.S President Barack Obama. As the first scientist to hold a Cabinet position and the longest serving Energy Secretary, he recruited outstanding scientists and engineers into the Department of Energy. He began several initiatives including ARPA-E (Advanced Research Projects Agency – Energy), the Energy Innovation Hubs, and was personally tasked by President Obama to assist BP in stopping the Deepwater Horizon oil leak.

Prior to his cabinet post, he was director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, where he was active in pursuit of alternative and renewable energy technologies, and Professor of Physics and Applied Physics at Stanford University, where he helped launch Bio-X, a multi-disciplinary institute combining the physical and biological sciences with medicine and engineering. Previously he was head of the Quantum Electronics Research Department at AT&T Bell Laboratories.

Dr. Chu is a vocal advocate for more research into renewable energy and nuclear power, arguing that a shift away from fossil fuels is essential to combating climate change. He has conceived of a global “glucose economy”, a form of a low-carbon economy, in which glucose from tropical plants is shipped around like oil is today. On 22 February, 2019, Dr. Chu began a one-year term as president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science

Dr Melanie Windridge is a specialist in fusion energy who helps people see the value and opportunities of fusion to society and their businesses. She is a plasma physicist, speaker, writer… with a taste for adventure. Melanie has a PhD in plasma physics (fusion energy) from Imperial College London, is Communications Consultant for privately-funded fusion company Tokamak Energy and Founder of Fusion Energy Insights. She was previously UK Director of the Fusion Industry Association. Melanie is the author of Aurora: In Search of the Northern Lights and Star Chambers: the race for fusion power. She hosts a blog, Science at Extremes, on her website and writes for Forbes online. 

www.melaniewindridge.co.uk 

www.fusionenergyinsights.com 

Akshat Rathi is senior climate reporter for Bloomberg News. He is the host of Zero, a weekly climate podcast for Bloomberg Green and writes a weekly newsletter on climate solutions.

He has a PhD in organic chemistry from the University of Oxford, and a BTech in chemical engineering from the Institute of Chemical Technology in Mumbai. He has worked for Quartz and The Economist. His work has been cited in widely read global publications, including New York Times, Washington Post, New Yorker, The Guardian, Wall Street Journal and Financial Times.

Akshat is also author of Climate Capitalism: Winning the Global Race to Zero Emissions, that describes a journey across five continents, Climate Capitalism tracks the unlikely heroes driving the fight against climate change. From the Chinese bureaucrat who did more to make electric cars a reality than Elon Musk, to the Danish students who helped to build the world’s longest-operating wind turbine, or the American oil executive building the technology that can reverse climate damages, we meet the people working to scale technologies that are finally able to bend the emissions curve.

Preorder here

Combining innovation and exploration to tackle the great challenges of our time

It is in Bertrand Piccard’s DNA to go beyond the obvious and achieve the impossible. From a legendary lineage of explorers who conquered the stratosphere and the abysses, he made history by accomplishing two aeronautical firsts, around the world non-stop in a balloon, and more recently in a solar plane without fuel. Pioneer in his way to consider ecology through the lens of profitability, he began working in the early 2000s to promote renewable energies and clean technologies. His dual identity as a psychiatrist and explorer makes him an influential voice heard by the largest institutions which today consider him as a forward-thinking leader on the themes of innovation and sustainability. Founder and Chairman of the Solar Impulse Foundation, he has succeeded in his mission to select 1000 efficient solutions to protect the environment in a profitable way. In a third round the world tour, he will bring them to decision-makers in order to help them meet their environmental targets while ensuring clean economic growth.

Bertrand Piccard is now United Nations Goodwill Ambassador for the Environment and Special Advisor to the European Commission.

Managing Director of Mining, Metals and Industries Finance, Regional Head EMEA & CIS, Société Générale

Christophe Roux has more than 20 years experience in natural resources financing and advisory, of which 20 years in extractive industries. As a Regional Head, Christophe supervises the execution of arranging and advisory mandates in Middle East, Africa, Europe, Russia and Central Asia across the different minerals value chains

Between 2006 and 2017, in charge of SG’s upstream oil&gas finance activity in the same region, he and his team led the execution of approx. 70 arranging and advisory mandates. Previously Christophe has been heading origination of structured commodity transactions in Paris and Singapore. He graduated at the University of Cologne and started his career in Frankfurt.

Constantijn van Oranje leads Techleap.nl, the accelerator for the tech ecosystem in The Netherlands. As Special Envoy, he is on a mission to turn The Netherlands into a unicorn nation. He and his team connect the Dutch tech ecosystem to help ambitious and promising Dutch tech companies grow fast internationally by improving their access to capital, market, talent and technologies.

Constantijn co-founded StartupFest Europe, which is still the biggest start-up event ever organized in The Netherlands. Previously, he was Chief of Staff to VP Neelie Kroes at the European Commission in charge of the Digital Agenda and led the Brussels office of the RAND Corporation.

He is member of the National Growth Fund Assessment Committee and Member of the NATO Innovation Fund Board of Directors. Constantijn is also the Director Digital Technology & Macro Strategy at Macro Advisory Partners in London and New York, and Edge Fellow at Deloitte Centre for the Edge. Additionally, he is ambassador of the European Innovation Council.

Aside from innovation and technology, Constantijn van Oranje is passionate about art, music, photography and nature.

Daniel Goldman has more than 25 years of energy industry experience in strategy, corporate and project finance, and project development, as well as private equity/asset investment and early-stage venture investing.  Over the course of his career, Mr. Goldman’s experience has spanned the upstream, mid-stream and downstream oil, gas, coal and power generation sectors of the industry, and since 2000 has included an extensive focus on clean energy asset development and finance, energy efficiency technology development, as well as venture and project investments, both domestically and internationally.  In addition to co-founding CEVG, since 2006, he has held executive positions at GreatPoint Energy, including until September, 2016 as its president and chief financial officer.  GreatPoint Energy is a clean energy gasification company which Mr. Goldman helped to raise over $280 million from investors such as Kleiner Perkins, Khosla Ventures, Citi, Dow Chemical and China Wanxiang.  GreatPoint Energy is now a subsidiary of China Wanxiang.

From 2002-06, Mr. Goldman co-founded and was the chief financial officer at New Energy Capital, one of the first firms focused exclusively on investments in clean energy assets using proven technologies with backing from the California State Teachers Retirement System (CalSTRS) and VantagePoint Capital Partners.  New Energy Capital invested in a portfolio of clean energy and bio-fuels projects[1] during 2004-05 and ultimately sold a large portion of the portfolio in 2006 at an exit multiple (net of fees) of approximately 2.1x, delivering an annualized IRR of approximately 30% for the investors.  Previously, from 1996-2001, he held senior development and finance positions in Hong Kong and Boston at InterGen, a Bechtel-Shell joint venture global power development company, where he was involved in developing and financing thousands of megawatts of power generation facilities globally. Mr. Goldman started his professional career at Arthur D. Little, where he held positions of increasing responsibility as a senior member of the global energy consulting team in Cambridge, MA and Singapore from 1989-1996.  He was responsible for Arthur D. Little’s Asia Pacific Energy Consulting Practice from 1992-96.

Mr. Goldman holds a wide range of advisor and board roles: co-founder and director of Environmental Entrepreneurs (E2); member of the board of directors, or a board observer, of several clean energy technology companies, including the following Fund I portfolio companies: LineVision (director), SparkMeter (director), ConnectDER (director), ClearTrace (director), ndustrial (director), ClearFlame Engines (observer), Advanced Ionics (observer), and Nth Cycle (observer); and the following pre-Fund I SPV companies: REsurety (director) and Quidnet Energy (observer).  Mr. Goldman also serves as the Chair of the Board of Directors, and member of the Executive Committee, of the Northeast Clean Energy Council, the leading advocate for the clean energy sector in the Northeast region and a co-founder and member of the Board of Directors and Executive Committee of Browning the Green Space, a 501(c)(3) organization with the mission to bring more diversity into the clean energy and climate tech ecosystem.  He has also focused on policy advocacy work to bring investors, policy makers and technology developers together to address issues of finance, scale-up and commercialization, among other key issues.

Mr. Goldman received a B.S. from Cornell University and an M.Sc. from the London School of Economics.  He is a member of the External Advisory Board (and board chair from October 2013-15) of Cornell’s Atkinson Center for a Sustainable Future and has previously held other advisory board positions at Cornell.  Mr. Goldman lives in Newton, MA with his wife and three children, and is a competitive road cyclist and triathlete.

Dr. Daniel M. Kammen is a Professor of Energy at the University of California, Berkeley, with parallel appointments in the Energy and Resources Group where he serves as Chair, the Goldman School of Public Policy where he directs the Center for Environmental Policy, and the department of Nuclear Engineering. Dr. Kammen is the founding director of the Renewable and Appropriate Energy Laboratory (RAEL; http://rael.berkeley.edu), and was Director of the Transportation Sustainability Research Center from 2007 – 2015

He was appointed by then Secretary of State Hilary Clinton in April 2010 as the first energy fellow of the Environment and Climate Partnership for the Americas (ECPA) initiative.  He began service as the Science Envoy for U. S. Secretary of State John Kerry in 2016, but resigned over President Trump’s policies in August, 2017.  He has served the State of California and US federal government in expert and advisory capacities, including time at the US Environmental Protection Agency, US Department of Energy, the Agency for International Development (USAID) and the Office of Science and Technology Policy

Dr. Kammen was educated in physics at Cornell (BA 1984) and Harvard (MA 1986; PhD 1988), and held postdoctoral positions at the California Institute of Technology and Harvard. He was an Assistant Professor and Chair of the Science, Technology and Environmental Policy Program at the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University before moving to the University of California, Berkeley. Dr. Kammen has served as a contributing or coordinating lead author on various reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change since 1999.  The IPCC shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize.

Dr. Kammen helped found over 10 companies, including Enphase that went public in 2012, Renewable Funding (Renew Financial) a Property Assessed Clean Energy (PACE) implementing company that went public in 2014.  Dr. Kammen played a central role in developing the successful bid for the $500 million energy biosciences institute funded by BP.

During 2010-2011 Dr. Kammen served as the World Bank Group’s first Chief Technical Specialist for Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency. While there Dr. Kammen worked on the Kenya-Ethiopia “green corridor” transmission project, Morocco’s green transformation, the 10-year energy strategy for the World Bank, and on investing in household energy and gender equity.  He was appointed to this newly-created position in October 2010, in which he provided strategic leadership on policy, technical, and operational fronts. The aim is to enhance the operational impact of the Bank’s renewable energy and energy efficiency activities while expanding the institution’s role as an enabler of global dialogue on moving energy development to a cleaner and more sustainable pathway.  Dr. Kammen’s work at the World Bank included funding electrified personal and municipal vehicles in China, and the $1.24 billion transmission project linking renewable energy assets in Kenya and Ethiopia.

He has authored or co-authored 12 books, written more than 300 peer-reviewed journal publications, and has testified more than 40 times to U.S. state and federal congressional briefings, and has provided various governments with more than 50 technical reports. For details see http;//rael.berkeley.edu/publications.  Dr. Kammen also served for many years on the Technical Review board of the Global Environment Facility.  He is the Specialty Chief Editor for Understanding Earth and Its Resources for Frontiers for Young Minds.

Dr. Kammen is a frequent contributor to or commentator in international news media, including Newsweek, Time, The New York Times, The Guardian, and The Financial Times. Dr. Kammen has appeared on ‘60 Minutes’ (twice), NOVA, Frontline, and hosted the six-part Discovery Channel series Ecopolis.  Dr. Kammen is a Permanent Fellow of the African Academy of Sciences, a fellow of the American Academy for the Advancement of Science, and the American Physical Society. In the US, has served on several National Academy of Sciences boards and panels.

Dr. Kammen was a keynote speaker at TBB.2018

Sopna joined the board of RWE Generation SE in February 2021, responsible for coordinating RWE’s hydrogen activities and driving strategy development, regulatory affairs and integration management.

At the start of her career in management consultancy with McKinsey & Company, Sopra mostly served clients in the financial services sector, and worked on transformation topics. She later joined the energy industry and held various positions at E.ON such as Director Energy Solutions, Director Business Development & Business Affairs for the renewables business and member of the inhouse consulting management team. At Uniper she was leading the area Energy Services & Infrastructure.

RWE all energy and resources are put towards making a sustainable life possible. Investing massively in expanding renewables and staying involved in innovative hydrogen projects, RWE is consistently reducing carbon emissions to become carbon neutral by 2040.

 Jean-Christophe Laloux is Director General, Head of EU Lending and Advisory Operations, at the European Investment Bank (EIB), the long-term financing institution of the European Union. 

During his 8-year tenor at the head of the frontline of EIB, the Bank delivered more than EUR 500 billion in new financing operations. Mr. Laloux has been instrumental in transforming the business delivery model of the Bank. Between 2015 and 2020, he steered the delivery of the EUR 60 billion Investment Plan for Europe, successfully introducing and executing milestone innovations such as Venture Debt and Risk sharing instruments. He also headed the delivery of the Economic Resilience Initiative launched by the EIB in response to the 2017 refugee crisis, and more recently lead the execution of the EUR 25 billion Pan-European Guarantee Fund in response to the COVID crisis. 

Prior to his current function and since joining EIB in 1999, he held various frontline positions, and was also EIB’s Head of Human Resources (2011-2013). 

Before joining the Bank, he was a management consultant (the Boston Consulting Group and PWC). 

He holds a degree in Commercial Engineering from the Catholic University of Leuven, a post-graduate degree in Management (magna cum laude) from the University of Ghent, and a Master of Business Administration (distinction) from the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University – USA. 

He speaks English, French, German and Dutch. 

Jens Wiese is the Head of Group M&A, Investment Advisory and Partnerships at Volkswagen AG. He has held multiple roles during his tenure at VW, including as Head of Group Battery Strategy.

He is a member of the Supervisory Board of QuantumScape Corp. Prior to joining VW, he served as a management consultant and held senior roles at AlixPartners and Roland Berger, focusing on the automotive and other industrial sectors.

He holds an MBA from Ludwig-Maximilians University, Munich.

Former NASA astronaut and highly decorated combat fighter Ron Garan racked up 178 days in space and more than 71 million miles in 2,842 orbits between tours on the US Space Shuttle, Russian Soyuz spacecraft, and the International Space Station. During his time in space, Ron conducted four spacewalks in support of ISS construction and maintenance. Prior to those space journeys, he lived and conducted research on the bottom of the ocean in the world’s only undersea research lab, Aquarius.

Ron has been involved in many global mass collaboration and citizen science programs. He is also a serial entrepreneur and has founded multiple business enterprises/social-impact focused start-ups including Manna Energy Ltd. which is the first organization to successfully register a UN carbon credit for water treatment and has helped provide clean water to millions.

He is the author of the critically acclaimed books, The Orbital Perspective, the recently-released, Floating in Darkness – A Journey of Evolution, and the children’s book, Railroad to the Moon.

Ron is a sought after public speaker who has presented on the world stage at the UN,TED, the World Economic Forum, COP-26, and many other global venues.

Ron is celebrated not just for his research in space but also for his humanitarian contribution to life on Earth.