Last week you got to meet Owen Power of Enerpower. Now it is the turn of Steve O’Neil of the REC Group to answer our six questions:
1. How are you personally – and as a company – coping with the corona crisis?
Health and safety have certainly been in the spotlight this year. It is therefore reassuring that REC has always taken its responsibilities as a corporate citizen extremely seriously, putting top priority on keeping our staff safe and healthy at work. For our manufacturing facilities in Singapore, we just successfully passed audits on the ISO 45001 Occupational Health & Safety Management and the ISO 14001 certification for Environmental Management System. Adapting our strict HSE standards to the new corona-induced needs was therefore not a “culture shock”. At our integrated manufacturing site in Singapore, we maintained 24/7 continuous operations throughout the Covid restrictions by demonstrating the highest standards of care in compliance with Ministry of Manpower requirements for split teams, worker segregation, health monitoring, contact tracing, PPE, telemedicine facilities, strict hygiene and safe distancing enforcement. The REC team developed a mobile app and central dashboard for monitoring of body temperature, and I have been entering my temperature twice daily now for many months, even while working from home. Our people all over the world have quickly and successfully adapted to working remotely irrespectively the location. As CEO, I am personally extremely impressed and proud how well this is going. Also, our Key Account Managers have been able to strengthen the customer relationships to our distributors and installers even more by helping them to navigate through this global challenge. Joining forces with our customers is a given for every REC employee now.
For me personally, when my continuous global travel came to a sudden halt, I found I had much more time to focus on the things that really matter.
2. What are you enthusiastic about, apart from your company?
The solar PV business has experienced many ups and downs in its three decades. But we have never lost our track of becoming competitive with fossil fuels by bringing pioneering technology to the market. At REC, we understand that empowering communities globally with clean energy on a large scale can only happen through high-efficiency innovation. I am enthusiastic and proud to be part of such a dedicated company in an industry which is making such an impressive progress on bringing down the costs per kilowatt hour for businesses and homeowners in order to leverage power independence and mitigate climate change.
From a more personal perspective, I am really impressed by our young “Fridays for Future” generation. Of course, you can argue if and how all of their demands can be made a reality – but you cannot deny their clear understanding regarding the seriousness of climate change and their vivid engagement to fight it. Please keep on going, we need your action!
3. What social media account or podcast makes your life better?
While running every day, I am an avid listener to renewable energy-related podcasts including: The Energy Gang, Climate Connections, Redefining Energy, How to Save a Planet, A Matter of Degrees, and The Interchange. On social media, I avoid Twitter for my own sanity and focus mostly on LinkedIn as a great way to stay in touch with colleagues around the world.
4. Whom would you like to meet/have met?
I would love to go back in time to meet solar industry pioneers like Gerald Pearson, Calvin Fuller and Daryl Chapin, who designed the world’s first practical silicon solar cell in 1954 and noted that this technology may lead “eventually to the realization of one of mankind’s most cherished dreams – the harnessing of the almost limitless energy of the sun for the uses of civilization.”
5. If you could change one thing in the world – other than the corona crisis, of course – what would it be?
Stop the second large crisis of our time: climate change and the subsequent impacts for nature and humans. That is why I joined REC and the reason I am getting up every day. If I could shift global energy production to 100 per cent renewables, increase the efficiency of buildings, decarbonize transport, agriculture and industry at once – I would certainly do it.
6. What aspect of your company’s work are you most proud of?
The passion of our technology and operation teams to fight not only for big technology leaps but also for every tenth of one per cent in efficiency gain and their drive to save that extra penny of costs for our customers. (mfo)
