Joaquín Aparicio: Delusional Until It Works

He started out as an intern shadowing project managers on huge wind farm grid connections in the remote southwest of Scotland through brutal Scottish winters.

He pushed to become project manager himself and landed the job as one of the youngest PMs in the business.

Then, straight away, he was handed some of the most complex projects going.

And your career moves

then, you went through Iberdrola to SP Energy Networks to Scottish Power.

I guess a lot of that was within the same company.

It

was the same company, yes.

So I started within Iberdrola Engineering and Construction, which was a subsidiary of Iberdrola abroad to do projects for parts of the organization, which in that case was Scottish Power Energy Networks.

So basically it was a subsidiary in the UK responsible for all the transmission assets, constructing and operating those.

And we were absorbed by that company eventually.

And I spent roughly from door to door five years in networks.

And after that, I moved into the Scottish Power Renewables arm, which is a different kind of company over five years after that.

And it was really interesting because it was a different type of organization.

It was a bit more agile, a bit more on the forefront of the energy transition because we were doing the first solar projects in the country, the first battery projects in the country, even hybrid projects, which are now the thing.

We were talking about 2020, 2021, actually during COVID.

It was really, really interesting to see all the big parts of such incredible organizations like Iberjola, because for me, it's one of the energy leaders.

In Europe, I work for a reason, right? And that reason is the excellence in operations and how well certain things were done.

So you went from initially working on the kind of, as we've discussed, kind of connectivity and cabling aspects, good connection, etc.

And then through your journey into like project management, you began to focus on more, you know, renewable projects or solar best, etc.

Yeah,

exactly.

Yeah, actually we were on the other side of the fence complaining about why these projects are taking so long to connect into the network.

So yeah, it was very interesting because in a matter of years you could see both ends of the same, of the same stuff.

And it was challenging as well because you need to adapt.

He started out as an intern shadowing project managers on huge wind farm grid connections in the remote southwest of Scotland through brutal Scottish winters.

He pushed to become project manager himself and landed the job as one of the youngest PMs in the business.

Then, straight away, he was handed some of the most complex projects going.

And your career moves

then, you went through Iberdrola to SP Energy Networks to Scottish Power.

I guess a lot of that was within the same company.

It

was the same company, yes.

So I started within Iberdrola Engineering and Construction, which was a subsidiary of Iberdrola abroad to do projects for parts of the organization, which in that case was Scottish Power Energy Networks.

So basically it was a subsidiary in the UK responsible for all the transmission assets, constructing and operating those.

And we were absorbed by that company eventually.

And I spent roughly from door to door five years in networks.

And after that, I moved into the Scottish Power Renewables arm, which is a different kind of company over five years after that.

And it was really interesting because it was a different type of organization.

It was a bit more agile, a bit more on the forefront of the energy transition because we were doing the first solar projects in the country, the first battery projects in the country, even hybrid projects, which are now the thing.

We were talking about 2020, 2021, actually during COVID.

It was really, really interesting to see all the big parts of such incredible organizations like Iberjola, because for me, it's one of the energy leaders.

In Europe, I work for a reason, right? And that reason is the excellence in operations and how well certain things were done.

So you went from initially working on the kind of, as we've discussed, kind of connectivity and cabling aspects, good connection, etc.

And then through your journey into like project management, you began to focus on more, you know, renewable projects or solar best, etc.

Yeah,

exactly.

Yeah, actually we were on the other side of the fence complaining about why these projects are taking so long to connect into the network.

So yeah, it was very interesting because in a matter of years you could see both ends of the same, of the same stuff.

And it was challenging as well because you need to adapt.