The team at Conrad Energy combines industry experience and expertise with technical and commercial creativity. From fund specialists to corporate lawyers, engineers and planners, our people’s diverse backgrounds and skills make for a robust business which is able to scale both rapidly and responsibly.
Our team is increasing by 15-20% a year, consistently attracting new talent to grow with the business under the guidance of our senior leadership team.
The executive team
Damian Darragh
Chairman
Damian is a Fund Partner at I Squared Capital. He has a highly successful track record of private equity infrastructure investment including setting up and sponsoring IPPs. He has previously led the build out of three successful power generation companies in Infinis (UK), Everpower (USA) and RTR (Italy) through organic and buy-and-build growth strategies. He had a 20-year career with Terra Firma Capital Partners where he was latterly a Managing Director. He is also a non-executive director at the Energia Group (island of Ireland) and Lynher Energy.
Steven Hardman
Chief Executive Officer
Steven is a corporate lawyer by profession but has spent the last 25 years in private equity owned businesses, including aggregates, waste and energy. He has built out portfolios of waste management assets, gas generation installations, onshore wind and hydro. One of the co-founders of Conrad Energy, he is now responsible for nearly 1GW of peak generating assets, solar and battery energy storage as well as cutting edge energy technologies such as hydrogen, as Conrad Energy spearheads the energy transition.
David Bates
Chief Financial Officer
David joined us in 2020 following the successful acquisition of Viridis Power. During his tenure as CFO at Viridis, he guided the business through the build out of 323MW of gas peaking plant and optimised the operation of an additional 220MW of STOR plant. David also led a number of capital raises and refinancings with multiple counterparties in the UK energy space. He is a Chartered Accountant, having initially qualified with KPMG.
Chris Cody
Chief Information Officer
Chris has worked in the UK energy sector for over 20 years, and is passionate about using technology to address the challenges in the sector. His career started in plant operations, before he moved into energy trading and production optimisation, across a 4GW+ thermal fleet. After leading a pipeline of data analytics and operational insight projects, he founded TGG with Rhys Kirk, where he created the forerunner to iON+, a flexible power asset dispatch and monitoring solution for decentralised power assets.
Steve Conry
Chief Operating Officer
Steve has over 23 years’ experience developing, constructing and operating power generation, solar and storage projects. Having worked previously for Viridor, Cory Environmental and Alkane Energy, Steve has extensive experience on LFG, aerobic digestion, biomethane, coal mine methane and natural gas fuelled projects. He has successfully built out and operated in excess of 1GW of embedded power projects.
Neil Filkin
Technical Director
Neil has 25 years’ experience successfully delivering change and improvement into operational environments across energy, engineering and manufacturing sectors. Formerly the Operations Director of Viridis Power, he has also worked for Infinis, Rolls-Royce and Philips. Neil holds a PhD from Cambridge University and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry.
Rhys Kirk
Chief Technology Officer
Rhys is one of the UK’s foremost experts in OSIsoft/Aveva’s PI System – the enterprise-grade backbone of the country’s power infrastructure, and throughout his career has worked to solve energy and enterprise-level companies’ tech issues. Prior to setting up TGG, which Conrad Energy acquired in 2022, Rhys worked with Shell, Wipro Technologies, Centrica and Accenture.
Guy McConnell
Chief Marketing Officer
Guy has over 30 years of experience working in marketing. He started his career at Black Cat – an integrated marketing agency. Guy was part of the management team that sold the agency to WPP 10 years later. In 2004, he founded the UK’s first charity water brand – One – alongside 3 friends. The brand has gone on to raise £25m for clean water projects and permanently change the lives of over 4m people. In 2005, Guy set up the multi award-winning CRM agency, BURN, which he sold in 2020. He joined the team at Conrad Energy in 2023.
Steve Moody
Trading Director
Steve has over 12 years’ market experience, including seven years at ENGIE optimising the UK thermal and pumped storage fleet in merchant, balancing and ancillary service markets. He has a deep understanding of market design, charging methodology and the CUSC. His technical knowledge includes building optimisation programs across multiple markets and assets. Steve is qualified as a field archaeologist.
Sarah Moore
Head of HSQE
Sarah has over 25 years experience in Health, Safety, Quality & Environment (HSQE). She has worked for blue chip companies in Switzerland, the Netherlands and here in the UK. As head of HSQE Sarah is driving our safety strategy and integrating with the teams to build a strong safety culture across the business. She is lead in ensuring we maintain our ISO accreditations of 14001, 9001, 45001, with the additional accreditations of 50001 and 22301 in 2024.
Lee Priestley
Commercial Director
Lee spent 18 years at Centrica working in Energy Marketing and Trading. During this time, he spent 10 years as a UK Power Trader and 6 years as Head of Power Origination. After leaving Centrica, Lee spent a year at National Grid as Head of Business Development.
Sonia Quiterio
New Business Director
Sonia has global experience across a range of generation technologies and joined Conrad Energy from Sembcorp Energy UK where she worked as Senior BESS Asset Manager. As New Business Director, Sonia is driving our strategy to introduce energy storage and net zero technologies to our portfolio. Sonia holds an MBA from Nottingham Business School.
Philip Silk
Development Director
Phil’s experience in energy includes a broad spectrum of projects, ranging from flexible generation, battery storage, solar, geothermal, gas storage and oil and gas, with significant experience on the development and delivery of projects. As our Development Director, he is responsible for driving the origination and development of new generation projects across various technologies. Phil holds an MSc from Oxford Brookes University.