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Irish businessman and renewable energy entrepreneur Eddie O’Connor has died. Mr. O’Connor is the former CEO of Bord na Móna, founder of Airtricity, and co-founder of Mainstream Renewables and Supernode.
A former purchasing manager at ESB, he became CEO of Bordo na Móna late in his career change.
Mr O’Connor, 76, moved to renewable energy in the late 1990s and became one of the company’s key business figures on its latest project, the promotion of a pan-European “supergrid” for renewable energy.
The business he set up after leaving Bord na Móna made him very wealthy, but he told The Irish Times in 2021 that wealth accumulation was not his main motivation.
“Money didn’t motivate me,” he said, adding that he has lived in the same “tiny house” since 1988. “I’m so wealthy now that I have to manage it.”
Originally from Roscommon, Mr O’Connor holds a degree in chemical engineering and a master’s degree in industrial engineering from University College Dublin, as well as a doctorate in business management.
He was appointed chief executive of Bordo na Móna in 1987 and spent nine years radically rethinking its strategic focus. He left the company in acrimony after the board concluded his remuneration package breached government guidelines.
In 1997, he became founder and chief executive officer of Airtricity, an Irish wind power development company. In January 2008, the business was sold to E.ON and Scottish & Southern Energy for €2 billion, with Mr O’Connor reported to have made a profit of €40 million on the deal.
After Airtricity, Mr. O’Connor was involved in founding Mainstream Renewable Power, which subsequently held wind and solar assets in Europe, Latin America, Africa and Asia Pacific.
In May 2021, Norwegian company Aaker Horizons acquired a majority stake in Mainstream, and a year later Japanese multinational Mitsui & Co. became a long-term strategic investor.
The sale to Aaker was worth around €500 million to Mr O’Connor, who said in a 2021 interview that it was “a significant spoils for someone at the ripe old age of 73”.
Meanwhile, he and Mainstream were developing the Supernode project. This includes plans to distribute electricity from renewable energy across the continent using ultra-thin superconducting metals cooled with liquid nitrogen.
O’Connor also began pushing for a European supergrid that would make it easier to get cheap offshore energy in northwestern Europe and solar energy from around the Mediterranean to the heart of Europe, where it is most in demand.
More recently, the mainstream has experienced a massive financial reversal. Late last year, the company announced plans to cut its cost base by more than a third after posting a pre-tax loss of more than 1.2 billion euros in the period since 2022.
In a 2021 interview with The Irish Times, Mr O’Connor said during his time at Bord na Móna, directors discussed how the peat the company produced and burned at its power stations was having a negative impact on the environment. I recalled what he had done for me.
“I said: ‘Really? But it’s the only way we make electricity.” And I was a major polluter in Ireland at the time, responsible for emitting 10 million tonnes of CO2 from the peat used to generate electricity.Since then, I have decided on this [renewable energy] That would be the mission. ”
Mr O’Connor’s book, ‘Supergrids – Supersolutions: The key to solving the energy crisis and decarbonising Europe’, co-authored with Kevin O’Sullivan, Environmental Science Editor of The Irish Times, will be published in March 2023. It was done.
Mr O’Connor was diagnosed last year and had been working until recently. He is survived by his wife Hildegard and his family.
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