About
Kinetik NRG is led by Richard O’Rourke. He has more than twenty years’ experience where the energy transition, new ventures and finance meet.
Energy and finance
Richard established a £15m social impact fund for Pure Leapfrog, a charity developing the UK community energy sector, and went on to establish its trading subsidiary, Leapfrog Finance, as managing director. Big Society Capital invested to establish the fund and later increased its investment to £30m. The fund helped communities finance or acquire more than 23 MW of ground-mounted solar generation. He has since refinanced solar portfolios of more than 20 MW and founded SolarShare.
He completed the Global Energy MBA at Warwick Business School in 2014, with a dissertation on green infrastructure finance and the securitisation of energy-efficiency and distributed-generation projects.
Engineering and ventures
Richard graduated in Industrial Chemistry from the University of Limerick in 1996, after a year of product and process development with Loctite in Ireland and the US. He worked as a development engineer for General Semiconductor in Taiwan and researched solid oxide fuel cells at EPFL in Switzerland. In 2000 he co-founded Kinematik and became its CEO.
Research
His research applies the cybernetics of regulation, the science of how systems are kept under control, to the energy system and to AI. It is published at rsorourke.com.