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PES: North America90
MY VISION
My visionAs a marketer for Pall, Daniel Alessandri is used to asking questions of his suppliers, peers and colleagues. But answering them? In print? PES puts a selection of slightly more personal questions to one of the industry’s most influential figures.
PES: Welcome to PES magazine, can you firstly explain a little about your role, and how it relates to the wind industry?
Daniel Alessandri: I oversee some of the marketing activities of the power generation division at Pall, a leader in filtration and separations in a wide variety of industries. I currently focus a lot on Europe, the Middle East and Africa. I also lead a couple of global strategic initiatives, one of which is to increase our activity in the wind energy segment.
PES: How did you first become involved in the industry (what’s your career background)?
DA: I joined Pall in 1994 after engineering studies in France and Connecticut and service in the French air force. I always had a passion for energy and turbo machines, airplanes, turbines, rockets and the like. At the age of eight I would line up paper airplanes on the kitchen table and modify wing profiles in sequence to see which affected gliding the most.
And 15 years later I wrote my thesis on fuel mixing characteristics inside a scramjet engine – very different, but all stemming from the same fascination. Once at Pall, I held various commercial positions within the power generation division. Among the portfolio of mini-markets we serve is wind energy.
I specifically started to look after it upon my return to Europe in 2003. Since then, wind turbine applications became the focus of many product and commercial developments at Pall. But my interest marketing and strategy really developed during my MBA in New York.
PES: Which part of your job excites you the most?
DA: Part of my job is to look ahead and try to make sense of possible technology developments, trends, policies and I do enjoy the intellectual freedom and challenges that comes with it. But it’s always a little impersonal and even lonely sometimes. So I get real excitement when this prospective analysis coalesces into strategies, plans and action that people stand behind, convinced, motivated, driven. Seeing ideas and strategies turned into actions that people embrace is really my favorite part of the job
PES: What’s been your greatest professional achievement to date?
DA: I like to say that if I ever got an award for a professional achievement, I would love it if it were an honorary one for “an entire career”. What I mean is that rather than a single fact, event, challenge or feat, I’d like to look back and see all the little steps one take, the people you meet, those you keep as friends, the people at work whom you’ve trained, helped, managed. I think I get a real satisfaction from that. I like things that endure rather than shine.
PES: Do you believe that wind power will one day become as prevalent as fossil fuels?
DA: Yes. And that’s a very easy answer, as long as you look far enough into the future, and that’s the problem… the long-term scenario is well known. At some point we will run out of fossil fuel, period. Long before then, another energy source will have become as prevalent as oil and gas. Wind energy is right now of one the most promising technologies,
along with solar energy. I think it will surpass fossil fuels one day. But I am pretty sure I won’t be here to see it.
PES: What’s the biggest threat to your industry right now?
DA: I believe the filtration and separations industry is at the center of many environmental and public safety issues. These are very exciting and challenging times. I see many more opportunities than threats. Helping clean coal become reality, increasing nuclear safety, enabling new biofuel production or improving wind turbine reliability are all opportunities for our industry, and that’s just for the energy market. Food production and processing, medical advances and biotechnologies, or access to clean water around the world all depend on filtration and separations. I guess you could say the biggest threat would be to miss some of these opportunities. It’s still a very nice and fulfilling place to be in…
PES: There is a lot of talk about climate change denial – what’s your personal opinion on the debate?
DA: The issue of climate change is settled. Global warming is a fact supported by an overwhelming majority of the scientific, governmental and corporate actors in the world today. I think the only debate left is twofold: is human activity mainly responsible? and is there something we can do about it?
I have my convictions on the former, but I am especially interested in the latter. Scientific research just pushes the unknown further away. It is not so much about certainty as it is about asking the ‘next’ question. So
ASK THE EXPERTS
www.pes.eu.com 91
Clean,Efficient,
Plentiful…ReliableCleanliness Management forWind Turbines
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For further information contact:Pall Power GenerationTel: +33 1 3061 [email protected]
...Working to MakeGreener Cleaner
PES North Africa_108.95 x 279.4 15/04/2011 09:35 Page 1
to wait for an undeniable certainty linking global warming to human is a daydream. What we have is mounting evidence and correlation. We have the long term trends and a deepening knowledge of the climate processes at play, as complex as they may be. I think at some point all you can do is look at the mounting evidence and the growing signs, and then make a commitment, a leap of faith. If we do, then I believe we will really mitigate our impact, not only on our carbon footprint, but on the environment in general.
PES: Do you feel as if you are helping in some small way to make a difference to the world?
DA: Yes, of course. I think I wrote an article on this exact question two years ago in this magazine. I actually think we all make a difference to the world. If there is something we learnt from global climate change, it’s that seemingly small or irrelevant event can have a dramatic effect when compounded over time, and space. It’s the same with all of us. We are the small events that, when compounded in time and space, can and should make a world of difference.
For more information, please visit: www.pall.com
“Scientific research just pushes the unknown further away. It is not so much about certainty as it is about asking the ‘next’ question”
