George Kitoudis counts over 20 years of expertise in energy and environmental engineering as a systems designer, site supervisor and project manager. He experienced during his career a great number of areas such as solar heating and cooling, air ventilation as well as small solar thermal.

He eventually chose to work in the solar electric sector in the domains of production planning optimization, warehouse management as well as logistics.

Mr. Kitoudis joined the meeco team in 2008 as Technical and Operations Manager of meeco's Greek subsidiary, meeco Services Hellas S.A.

Having now worked well over 10 years in the solar industry, George helps meeco on a global scale and daily basis to realize the meeco mission towards affordable as well as reliable clean energy and resource efficiency.

Through this interview, given right after his recent business trip to meeco's subsidiary in Pakistan to supervise the installation of a sun2roof system for a key industrial customer, George shares with us the global dimension of his responsibilities.

Additionally he expands on the opportunities and the challenges encountered while being Key Account Manager for the countries of Malawi and Zimbabwe as well as investigating projects in other countries such as Kenya, Tanzania, Rwanda and Sri Lanka.

His tasks consist of the implementation of solar installations through meeco local offices located worldwide in order to address the needs of customers mainly from the business sector, who are interested in reducing their operating costs while contributing to a greener environment. For that, he visits many sites to work and contribute to their optimization.

This assessment occurs through steering and overseeing a high volume of different projects by detecting anomalies and developing tailored technical solutions.

Then, his findings must be summarized and presented through a standardized reporting system to allow an easy access and encourage discussions with the planning team in offices located in Europe. Indeed, his role is crucial by representing the bridge between head and local offices as well as with project managers on site and at the customer's office.

Recently, George was in Lahore in Pakistan to prepare the installation of a 3 MWp project for an industrial customer. The PV capacity has been installed on various types of roofs such as flat, trapezoidal and shell type.

His team faced difficulties with the specific designs of the roofs. Being not allowed to drill into the roof or carry out construction with heavy ballast, they had to design several completely new mounting structures to meet the special requirements.

Their design proposal had to consider then elements such as sufficient water drainage, respect wind loads and weight requirements of the construction whilst always observing the given budget and being cost efficient.

According to him, in order to overcome this kind of issues, his and his colleague's position who work on similar assignments requires a high sense of diligence to every detail and specificity of each project. He highlights also cultural differences and language barriers as factors that, if not properly considered, may lead to unexpected problems.

When we asked about how does a typical day look like for him, George answers: "Our business environment especially in the emerging markets where we see most growth is constantly changing, which requires us to continually adapt to different local conditions."

For him, the main challenge in the future will be the globally increasing need for electrical energy and especially to be able to provide access and resource efficiency in remote areas suffering from load shedding or the absence of grid connection altogether.

In his view, developing reliable and cost efficient technical solutions for this kind of markets around the world is a fascinating experience and the key challenge of our generation.