In April 2018, around the desk of an apartment in the Málaga neighborhood of Soho, Alicia Carrasco, a consultant with more than two decades of experience in the field of energy market regulation, was stamping her signature on the registration document that made official the registration of her next project: the European Energy Consultancy olivoENERGY.
“I’m sure that our apartment was one of the first in the country to implement teleworking and hot desks,” says a smiling Alicia. The family space was reconverted into a coworking from which they worked on European projects.
During this period, the first employees of the consultancy – two engineers, an international lawyer and herself – gathered around the living room table, unfolded cell phones, opened project management programs and that space became a sort of tower of babel in which English was the common language while Italian and German mingled with Spanish in conversations with clients.
“Alicia has been Executive Director at companies such as SIEMENS or TESLA, where, as we can imagine, she was used to working with the dynamics of large companies where you have support and resources; the rest of the team was also used to working in large companies and in international environments, so in the beginnings of olivoENERGY there were constant exercises of adaptation, taking advantage of synergies, equal distribution of resources and, above all, teamwork“, recalls Niccòlo Fattirolli, current Chief Executive Officer of the company.
The consultancy was taking its first steps and simultaneously Alicia founded ENTRA Agregación y Flexibilidad, the innovative Spanish association for demand aggregation and flexibility of which she is also Executive Director.
After the first hectic moments, the hard work paid off and the first clients and projects began to arrive. The first clients were pioneers in the area of innovation, regulation and digitalization such as ENTSO-E, the Catalan Competition Authority and Total Energy among others, or more recently, Lumenion, a leading German company offering decarbonization solutions for industry.
“We were born with a clear purpose: to promote energy transition and decarbonization through regulatory change. Today we continue supporting our clients in the design and implementation of energy transition strategies, deployment of new products or business development and, thanks to our know-how in understanding and predicting regulatory, changes and their scope and impact,” comments Alicia.
Five years have passed since those first steps and today olivoENERGY has offices located in Echegaray, 3 in the center of Málaga and a team of eight people with different profiles – economists, lawyers, engineers, communication and administration – working for a clear objective: to help companies, institutions and associations to navigate the disruptive environment of the energy system transition with experience, creativity and innovation.