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Joana FREITAS

Executive Board Member, EDP Generation

Joana is Executive Board Member of EDP Generation, the conventional generation unit of EDP Group, where she holds responsibilities in innovation and business development, a green hydrogen engineering global excellence center, digital transformation, sustainability and stakeholders’ management.

Some of her current responsibilities include: climate adaptation plans of hydro and thermal fleet, the transition plans of thermal plants into green energy projects, hybrid investments (coupling wind and solar plants to existing hydro connection points), floating PV projects, just transition plans of former coal plants and global delivery of green h2 engineering. Joana is part of EDP’s Global Innovation Steering, where she helps identify and select new businesses to invest in, in the decarbonization energy space. She is also a non-executive director of EDA- Electricidade dos Açores, the Azorean integrated power company, where innovative projects of batteries and isolated island systems are being deployed. Joana is vice-chair of the Generation & Environment Committee of Eurelectric.

Joana is an energy professional, having led a career as an executive in infrastructures’ operations and finance. She served as Director in REN (the Portuguese Transmission System Operator for electricity and natural gas), CFO of ESPART, a real estate developer, and COO of portway, a ground handling company. Joana started out in McKinsey as a consultant for seven years, leading projects in London, Rio de Janeiro and Lisbon. She went on to join the Cabinet of the Secretary of State of Treasury and Finance.

She obtained a MSc in Economics from Porto University (where she graduated first of her class), her MBA from INSEAD (Dean’s list honours).

In 2019 she co-founded Leading Together (leadingtogether.org), an initiative to promote gender balanced leaderships in business with the INSEAD Alumni Association and McKinsey & Company.

She is the host of the podcast Net Zero, with the Florence School of Regulation, on the energy transition and climate change in Europe, and the co-author of the ebook The journey to Net Zero

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