Book review: A Dangerous Visionary by Eddie O' Connor

This is the autobiography of Dr Eddie O'Connor, the Irishman founder of wind farm developer Airtricity, wind/solar developer Mainstream Renewables and supergrid company Supernode. (As always, my views are my own).

Before his own firms, he cut his teeth working for ESB (Ireland's then monopoly power generator and transmission provider), before leading Bord na Móna (BNM) the state-owned producer of peat for power stations. The memoir's title comes courtesy of a Civil Servant's label of Eddie during the period when he more than halved BNM's workforce (before increasing productivity from under 1,700 tonnes per head, to over 5,000).

In short: it's a great book. Eddie is a no-nonsense and thoughtful writer and, given his impressive achievements, modest. The main focus is on his time at the four companies, and his leadership ethos, and only very briefly about his upbringing.

Within its 230 pages, A Dangerous Visionary describes how he built Airtricity, which amongst other achievements built Ireland's first wind farm, and then sold the non-US assets to SSE for €1.8bn (personally grossing €55m).

It also details the immediate and heady rise of Mainstream - which, rather amazingly, his exit contract with SSE allowed him to set-up two weeks after leaving Airtricity. I can't think of another memoir that details how a renewables giant was set-up, so this is an especially interesting bit. The release of the book in early 2021 didn't allow O'Connor to tell the final chapter of his time at Mainstream - when Norwegian industry giant Aker bought 75% of Mainstream for a whopping $910m (O'Connor, having founded with €30m of his own money, was majority owner).

Despite all of his obvious success, O'Connor eschews much of the gratuitous name dropping that you'd expect from a high-profile character who must by now be a borderline billionaire, and when he does mention an encounter with the famous soul, it's proportionate and relevant to the story. He also doesn't shy away from justifying his actions or those that criticise him, including a robust defence against accusations of personal largesse when he was leader at the state-owned BNM.

He comes across as creative, generous and genuine, though well aware of his shortcomings. He seemingly values all of his staff in a straightforward way, and this is borne out by Mainstream's score of 4.8/5.0 on Glassdoor (including a hard-to-achieve 5.0 for Culture & Values).

Ever the innovator, Eddie reveals some interesting views on technologies bordering renewables. He is sceptical of the Hydrogen Economy, though he only mentions the relatively inefficient pathway of burning hydrogen in a combustion-engined vehicle, and not for high temperature industrial heat (e.g. for making cement, steel and glass). Likewise for Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS/CCUS) where he raises the spectre of it being too tempting for the lobbyists in oil and gas firms. I respect these views, though I wouldn't say that I see eye to eye with him, especially on hydrogen. It's true that some pathways wouldn't warrant the relatively low efficiencies of other energy vectors or methods of energy storage, though at the same time I would highlight the relative inability to electrify many heavy duty vehicles and some industrial processes.

The new majority owner of Mainstream, Aker, clearly has a differing view to O'Connor, in that along with Aker Offshore Wind, it also setup Aker Clean Hydrogen and Aker Carbon Capture. The Aker subsidiary that is parent to the four firms (including Mainstream), Aker Horizons, is led by the son of Aker's founder and majority owner.

That said, O'Connor admits that greater levels of novel long duration storage are needed to further mainstream renewables, given that major challenges occur once a grid contains more than 35% solar/wind. His latest startup, Supernode, comes from a concept that he first envisaged around the turn of the century: the supergrid. Supernode (which Aker Horizons also bought a large stake in) envisages deploying a huge network of subsea power cables meshing together Europe's offshore wind hotspots (e.g. the North, Atlantic, Baltic, Celtic, and Mediterranean Seas). The idea is that the wind is always blowing somewhere across Europe's seas, and there is a need to shakeup Europe's fragmented and somewhat cosy transmission local monopolies. It's certainly an ambitious idea, for the cables would use superconducting technology, containing liquid nitrogen/helium to minimise losses, and O'Connor estimates the network would cost in excess of £30bn/€35bn. His next book will be dedicated to supergrids.

Overall, the book is essential reading for anyone interested in the renewables industry - or technology innovation generally, for O'Connor believes that renewables is closer to the technology industry than to the energy industry. Also, if you just to read an honest account of how business works, with the boring bits taken out. Okay, it does have a few typos here and there, but overall it's generally very well written.