The New Generation Storage (NGS) Innovation Pact is fully aligned with the European Union’s energy transition strategy up to 2040, and the challenge for the complete electrification of mobility by 2035.

Through the cooperation of 47 entities, the aim is to structurally transform the country’s productive fabric, creating the necessary conditions – in terms of technology and human resources – for an industrial ecosystem capable of mass-producing innovative technologies, and a complete value chain that enables end-of-life management that is a global benchmark.

The Alliance for the Energy Transition represents a constellation of projects that drive the development of a truly structuring ecosystem for the energy transition and decarbonization.
ATE aims to strengthen the competitiveness and resilience of companies in the energy sector as a result of the creation of innovative products and solutions of an export nature, based on technology and know-how developed and consolidated in the sector, placing Portugal at the forefront of decarbonization and fostering an effective energy transition.

Andreia Carreiro is Cleanwatts’ VP of Innovation and Energy Policy. Andreia is an Energy and Sustainability Professional, with more than 10-year experience as Program and Project Manager, in national and international projects based upon R&D, technology and solutions applied to the sustainable development paradigms. She has held roles as Innovation and Strategy Manager, towards positioning and international competitiveness, also promoting the cooperation between public and private sectors. Andreia is also a former Regional Director for Energy at Azores Government, responsible for the development of the energy policy strategy and electric mobility towards the energy transition of the archipelago. She has also worked as an Energy Advisor to the deputy minister and Secretary of State for Energy, developing public policies strategies, legislation and programs in the Recovery and Resilience Plan scope. Andreia holds a PhD in Sustainable Energy Systems (MIT Portugal), MSc in Energy for Sustainability, MSc in Biomedical Engineering (University of Coimbra) and PgD MBA (Universidade Autónoma de Lisboa).

Reed Snyder is a Principal at Verdane and part of Cleanwatts Board. He is a member of Verdane’s Decarbonisation team, investing in ambitious growth businesses with quantifiable contributions to a lower carbon economy. Reed earned his Bachelor in Neuroscience from Harvard University.

The ILLIANCE Agenda addresses carbon neutrality associated with the buildings sector, through the design, development, and industrialization of complementary technologies, associated with 3 fundamental pillars, namely: health, comfort and sustainability.

These innovative technologies are integrated into a series of projects, which materialize the following integrated vision.

Aron Lazarchick is the VP of Growth & Marketing at Cleanwatts. He has been actively working in the renewable energy sector since 2016. Aron holds a Master’s in Energy Security from Masaryk University. His significant contributions include pioneering smart charging at Skoda Auto, where he established the first connection between the automaker and the Czech TSO on electromobility.

At Cleanwatts, Aron continues to drive innovation and progress in the industry. His role extends beyond traditional marketing and growth functions, encompassing a strategic focus on product management. Aron is responsible for leading organizational growth, optimizing customer acquisition strategies, and ensuring the seamless execution of energy flexibility initiatives. His work contributes to Cleanwatts’ efforts to provide clean, affordable energy for all, fostering sustainable growth and technological advancement.

João Rosário is a seasoned C-level executive with over 18 years of experience in investment management and leadership roles within the technology sector. As the Chief Financial Officer (CFO) at Cleanwatts, he oversees Finance, Legal and People, leveraging his expertise in strategic financial planning and operational management to drive organizational growth. His career includes various leadership and advisory roles as CFO and COO, spearheading global financial transactions, and extensive experience in business operations, marketing, customer success, sales, and data.

João holds a master’s degree in business administration, management, and finance from the Nova School of Business and Economics, where he serves on the supervisory board. He has enhanced his skills through executive programs at institutions such as Harvard Business School, Babson College, The London School of Economics and Political Science, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His commitment to continuous learning and rigorous financial stewardship has enabled him to streamline processes, mitigate risks, and unlock new revenue opportunities, ensuring long-term success for the organizations he serves.

35 years of experience from senior management and board positions in European power markets and infrastructure including CEO of Nord Pool, CEO of Polhem Infra (pension investment company in Nordic infrastructure), Board member of Statkraft (Europe’s largest renewable energy producer), numerous senior management positions within Vattenfall in Sweden, Poland and Germany, etc.

Emilio Costa is a private equity investor working for Cleanwatts lead investor Verdane, he is focused on energy transition and decarbonization thematics.

Emilio brings 5+ years of experience in the energy sector with a focus on generation technologies. He holds a BSc in Astronomy and Astrophysics and a MSc in Economics and Finance.

Lisa McDermott serves as an independent Non-Executive Director at Cleanwatts. She has more than 25 years’ experience in structured finance transactional and management roles, in the UK and the Netherlands, of which more than a decade of experience in renewable energy. She is currently also a Managing Director and Head of Energy Transition Project Financing at ABN AMRO Bank. A lawyer and banker by training, Lisa holds a first-class joint honours degree in Law and French from Queen’s University Belfast and is an accredited finance professional with the Dutch Securities Institute.

Carlos Oliveira is the VP of Services at Cleanwatts and brings with him 11 years of experience in the energy sector. Carlos has extensive experience in energy production facilities, both from conventional and renewable sources. He has expertise in energy management, markets, and the operation and maintenance of energy production assets. These have been key to the success of the renewable energy initiatives and energy communities promoted by Cleanwatts.

As an academic graduate, Carlos completed a master’s degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering, in the Energy area, at the University of Coimbra. He also has a postgraduate degree in Engineering and Management from Instituto Superior Técnico. Outside of work, Carlos devotes himself to his family and enjoys playing sport. This combination helps him maintain a healthy balance between his personal and professional life.

Mahomed Bashir brings nearly 25 years of experience in financial advisory, investment banking, and business development. He has held key roles in Portugal, Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East, including CFO of Alliance Healthcare Portugal and leadership positions at Banco Atlantico Europa and Mota-Engil Ambiente e Serviços.

Vasco serves as Chief Commercial Officer (CCO), covering commercial operations, international accounts, corporate business development, M&A, and the company’s Project Management Office.

An international executive with a passion for renewable energy, Vasco brings a breadth of experience in finance, sales and business operations. Prior to joining Cleanwatts, he held multiple leadership positions with General Electric. During his 21-year tenure with GE, Vasco worked in 10 countries, holding a variety of global and regional roles at GE Capital and GE Renewable Energy, where he served as Commercial & Risk CFO, Global FP&A Leader for GE’s Hydro division, and Chief Finance Officer for GE Digital Services. Most recently, he served as CFO for GE Healthcare in Latin America.

Vasco received his Bachelor’s degree in Business Management from the University of Coimbra, and holds an Executive MBA from ESADE Business School, in Barcelona. As CCO, Vasco focuses on building world class commercial operations to serve the company’s internationalization at market speed.

Maria studied in Physics Engineering at Coimbra University, and began her professional career at ISA – Intelligent Sensing Anywhere, S.A., in 2007, working on energy efficiency projects in public and private entities.

She has been involved in different VPS/Cleanwatts projects, always in the area of energy transition, with public entities, public lighting projects, energy efficiency in schools, universities, etc. She led the creation of the first energy community in Portugal, with Santa Casa da Misericórdia de Miranda do Douro.

Rita is a software engineer by training, who has held many roles over the past 15 years, including as a software developer, IoT protocol analyst, business analyst, IoT system architecture design, software and hardware development team leader and manager. She dedicates her efforts to the creation of distributed and reliable systems.

Lara has more than 15 years’ experience in leading and managing teams in different technical areas, such as software development, IT and support and PMO. She has extensive experience in leadership roles, having previously worked as software engineering director, CMMI implementation leader, customer support director, PMO director and operations director. Currently, Lara focuses on delivering IoT and Generations solutions, from conception to customer delivery and support.

The Medida Web Portal EE4Homes aims to promote more efficient household electricity consumption in Portugal. The project will promote more efficient practices and behaviours, supporting the implementation of national consumption reduction plans, as well as providing tools and procedures that foster energy optimisation and renewable self-consumption in this sector.

European Data Incubator (EDI) is an 8-month incubation programme for big data SMEs and startups in EuropThe project leverages the open innovation concept within the data economy to enable the development of big-data-driven innovations.

Many SMEs face problems when attempting to develop a comprehensive data strategyincluding a lack of up-front capital investment. Data therefore remains in silos and its availability or cross-domain value is still unperceived. EDI helps companies with a free infrastructure with open source tools, training on the most known off-the-self solutions, support and business services to develop business ideas and equity-free funding.

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 779790.

The SMART-PDM project aims to acquire manufacturing data to provide diagnosis and prognosis information while rendering the underlying technology financially feasible.

The Flexigy project aims to create an Energy Virtual Community concept that will operate behind the meter, that overcomes current legal barriers. The services will be developed in a way that the aggregator will engage energy assets with private bilateral contracts, allowing the use of distributed energy resources in a collaborative approach so that the benefit from the contribution of all community will be significant higher than the individual optimization of energy assets.

AESOP aims to develop a new platform to ensure the proper availability and performance levels of software solutions deployed by cloud providers. For business services to function correctly today, reliable cloud-based software solutions are a necessity. Although there are currently several different approaches and tools that monitor technical parameters, these are not enough for monitoring business levels. Therefore, there is a gap between what can be monitored and observed and what the business needs.

To overcome this gap, AESOP aims to develop a new platform that allows to specify a set of business parameters, while those parameters are part of a feedback adaptive loop that can actuate on those applications and its infrastructure beneath. This feedback loop will take advantage on virtualized infrastructure, built on infrastructure-as-code principles that are to extended to address the business level needs.

me² represents a new market place for urban actors in which a local community of electric vehicle (EV) users and local smart meter (SM) owners are brought together through means of a local urban online community. The combination of these technologies in a community allows to integrate mobility with electricity, to balance the grid, to reduce electricity costs, and to enable a feeling of local belonging. me² enables urban demand-side management, i.e. aims to modify consumer demand for energy such as using less energy during peak hours in an urban community.​

IANOS develops and applies solutions that can allow for full decarbonisation of Europe’s many islands and increase the share of renewable energy sources in the energy mix and exploiting the resources of islands, including geothermal, wind, tidal and solar energy.

IANOS will demonstrate how a VPP that uses Artificial Intelligence (AI) can optimise the generation of energy and balance demand and supply of energy on the islands. The AI is based on meta-learning predictive methods, fog computing, and a smart grid/advanced metering infrastructure integration to maintain stable system operation by taking into account several uncertainties and technical constraints such as ramp-up and down times, and compensating imbalances within various timeframes.

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 957810.

The sFlex project – Flexibility management of small loads, aims to develop an intelligent flexibility management platform that allows the use of flexibility from small loads focused on benefits to both Smart Buildings and Smart Grids. This will allow for the reduction of imbalances in grid balancing, reducing energy costs in buildings, maximizing the use of renewable energy, and enhancing new revenues with the use of flexibility.

GRETA studies the social side of the energy transition. We want to understand how energy citizenship works in different contexts and geographical levels. What kind of knowledge, social structures, technology or financial resources are needed to make an active energy citizen?

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 101022317.

Kiplo® STEP is a highly scalable, automated, adaptive, flexible, secure technical solution to deploy Transactive Energy Communities that enables an easy aggregation and monetization of demand flexibility and energy surplus by implementing different Energy Communities (EC) configurations connected with upstream markets (or multi-layered energy market) and energy transactive environments.

NetEffiCity intends to validate and demonstrate, on a large scale, previously developed technologies in R&D activitie, that increase energy efficiency in buildings by reducing energy consumption during the most expensive periods and optimizing available energetic resources management. It also aims to increase consumers’ energy independence by using global management tools for decentralized production.

The DOMINOES project aims to enable the discovery and development of new demand response, aggregation, grid management and peer-to-peer trading services by designing, developing and validating a transparent and scalable local energy market solution. The project will show how DSOs can dynamically and actively manage grid balance in the emerging future where microgrids, ultra-distributed generation and energy independent communities will be prevalent.

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 771066.

inteGRIDy (H2020) aims to integrate cutting-edge technologies, solutions and mechanisms in a scalable Cross-Functional Platform. This platform will connect energy networks with various stakeholders, facilitating optimal and dynamic operations of the Distribution Grid (DG), fostering the stability and coordination of distributed energy resources, and enabling collaborative storage schemes within an increasing share of renewables.

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 731268.

Ivo Gattulli is a seasoned professional with over about 20 years of experience in the energy sector. He has dedicated his career to business strategy and innovation, helping companies achieve their strategic goals and driving growth through energy transition and digitalization of energy sector.

In his role as the General Manager for Cleanwatts – Italy, he oversees the company’s operations and drives its expansion in the Italian market. He is known for his strategic thinking, innovative solutions, and deep knowledge of the industry.

FlexUnity aims to provide advanced tools and services to address the challenges of the energy transition. Its outcomes will support RES penetration, while ensuring grid stability and lower balancing costs, improving energy efficiency for end-users and increasing investments in self-generation, storage and load management. This will create more opportunities for consumers to capture value from their energy assets. 

FlexUnity’s main goal is to develop and validate the VPP digital tools based on advanced Artificial Intelligence, remote automatization and blockchain. These digital tools will be used to to optimize community energy flexibility, match consumer’s energy needs, ensure further development of RES, optimize distributed energy resources, and contribute to the current energy security and climate change challenges, while enhancing retailers and aggregators competitive advantage.

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 870146.

Kiome® offers real time energy visualization, management and control to homeowners and tenants in respect of their energy consumption, generation and storage as well as local tariff-based saving opportunities, historical reporting, basic analytics and forecasting. 

• Optimizes home and small offices’ energy consumption 
• Allows consumers/prosumers to participate in energy communities 
• Controls and schedules consumption remotely 
• Controls household appliances 
• Integrates storage and EV charging 
• Allows residential energy cost savings 
• Provides tariff-based saving opportunities 
• Historical reporting, basic analytics and forecasting 

Kisense® is our behind the meter efficiency and optimization engine, designed for commercial and industrial enterprises, including energy consumers and prosumers. 

Kisense® provides a wide range of advanced energy management services from real time visualization and predictive analytics to optimization and control of DER assets, individually and collectively, across multiple locations. 

• Aggregate, manage and optimize DER 
• Manage energy consumption, generation and storage 
• Artificial intelligence data analytics and forecasts 
• Alarms, reports, baselines and remote control 
• Multi-utility management 
• Interoperable with multiple HW vendors 
• Bill management from generation to consumption 
• Calculation of energy credits and grid charges 
• RES/IPP remote management 

Kiplo® is our ‘energy markets platform’ designed to aggregate small and medium energy loads, including batteries, EV chargers, heaters, boilers, chillers and distributed generation systems. Kiplo® works through our VPP to support community managers and energy market operators. 

Kiplo® includes three modules: 

• Kiplo® Energy Communities: enabling the optimization of renewable energy communities and peer-to-peer trading within a community 
• Kiplo® Flexibility Management: allowing both implicit and explicit demand response programs to generate additional energy savings for community members.  
• Kiplo® Energy Markets: supporting market operators to manage bids for improved day ahead and intraday planning. 

Soma is a  digitally savvy and seasoned HR Leader with 20+ years of international experience in Telco, Financial Services, Digital and Corporate sectors. He holds degrees in business studies and human resources management and, he is a graduate of GE’s prestigious Human Resources Leadership Program. Soma was an Advisory Board member of HR Fest (2016). He is a true believer in the power of teams and horizontal efficiency backed by a diverse and inclusive culture.

Luísa Matos is CEO and Co-founder of Cleanwatts with more than 18 years’ experience in senior management roles (CEO, CMO, CIO, CPO) in the Green and Digital Transformation areas, namely local energy markets, energy communities, VPPs, and demand-side flexibility. A trained economist, Luísa holds an MSc, MBA, Oxford DIPSI, and is completing a PhD in Strategy with research on business models innovation and local energy markets.

Felipe is a finance professional with over 15 years’ experience in global tech companies. Prior to joining Cleanwatts, Felipe was Head of Finance at Feedzai (AI Fraud Detection) for 7 years, leading the company through 5 rounds of capital investment and growth from 25 to 500+ FTE, as well as sales growth from €2 million to € 75 million and international expansion across legal, financial and tax perspectives.

Jorge brings over 25 years’ experience in distributed industrial systems, data communications and instrumentation. He was previously founder and CTO of ISA (Intelligent Sensing Anywhere), which scaled up to 150 FTE and reached an IPO in 2012. He was a foundational investor of Virtual Power Solutions (2014) and manager of several RDI European projects. Jorge holds a PhD in Technology Physics, and has served as a Professor at Coimbra University.

Michael is an executive with over 20 years’ experience in Fortune 50 companies, leading international commercial operations, corporate finance and large-scale transformations in multiple industries, tech sectors and financial services across the Americas, Europe and Asia.

With Cleanwatts, he is now committing his efforts to help build a world in which access to affordable clean energy is decentralized, digitalized and democratized.

Basilio is a serial entrepreneur with over 25 years’ experience as CEO. He was previously the founder and CEO of ISA (Intelligent Sensing Anywhere), which scaled up to 150 full time employees and reached an IPO in 2012. He was also a foundational investor of Virtual Power Solutions (2014) and Energia Simples (2015), and has served as a oard Member and Angel Investor  with many organisations. Basilio holds a PhD in Technology Physics, and is an Invited Professor for Innovation and Entrepreneurship at Coimbra University.

James McDougall is an entrepreneur, angel investor, venture capitalist, advisor and mentor with a global network for building and funding high performing teams, commercializing new technologies and leading companies in their crossing of the chasm for rapid growth and value creation.

His companies have raised over $400 million of early-stage and growth funding for start-ups, SMEs and public listed companies. James brings over 30 years of experience leading companies focused on developing and commercializing disruptive lithium polymer, solid state battery, inorganic electrolyte, zinc-air flow battery, nanotech ultra-capacitors, energy storage, renewable generation, VPP and energy efficiency technologies.