Cleaning Up: Leadership in an Age of Climate Change30 Huhti 2025

Uniper Rising: Can Germany's Gas Giant Go Green? Ep206: Michael Lewis

When Russia unleashed its illegal and unprovoked invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, gas prices in Europe spiked by a factor of 10, driving a wave of bankruptcies and restructurings of European energy companies. Uniper was one of those.

Uniper is one of Germany's largest energy companies. It is active across more than 40 countries and has 19.5 GW of power generation capacity to its name. It was one of the funders of the built-but-never-used Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline that connects Russia to Germany and, for most of its history, was heavily reliant on Russian gas.

So when the gas taps from Russia were turned off, Uniper reported losses of $40 billion — the highest losses in German corporate history — and was subsequently nationalised by the German government. The company has since returned to profitability under its new CEO, Michael Lewis, our guest this week on Cleaning Up.

Michael Lewis joins Michael Liebreich to discuss the company's rise from the ashes, and how it plans to reach its climate targets and overcome the dunkelflaute.

Leadership Circle:
Cleaning Up is supported by the Leadership Circle, and its founding members: Actis, Alcazar Energy, Davidson Kempner, EcoPragma Capital, EDP of Portugal, Eurelectric, the Gilardini Foundation, KKR, National Grid, Octopus Energy, Quadrature Climate Foundation, SDCL and Wärtsilä. For more information on the Leadership Circle, please visit https://www.cleaningup.live.

More from Cleaning Up:

The Sierra Leone documentary: https://youtu.be/z-5QjSfy2SM
Ep164 — Leonhard Birnbaum, CEO of EON: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pa-DHuPNEDg
Episode 175 — Greg Jackson, CEO of Octopus Energy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gl-cRh35Hm4
Episode 190 — Lord Adair Turner: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xxTngGxpeW0

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Why Are We Electrifying So Slowly? The Electrification Staircase | Ep256: Adrian Hiel, Silvia Madeddu, William Drake & Thomas Butler

Every single scenario for the future that looks at a cleaner energy system has electrification growing to 60, 70, 80% or more, and yet we don't make rapid progress. Why? One of the reasons we don't ma...

6 Touko 55min

Europe Needs Clean Tech More Than Ever | Ep 255: Thomas Pellerin-Carlin

This week Cleaning Up is back in Brussels, with a deep dive into European energy policy as the continent grapples with the reality of ambitious climate targets, very high energy prices and the vulnera...

29 Huhti 1h 15min

The Era Of Fossil Fuel Unreliability Has Begun | Ep 254: Jennifer Granholm

What happens when global energy supply chains can no longer be trusted? Has the U.S. given up its edge in the clean energy race to China? And can politics keep up with the speed of the energy transiti...

22 Huhti 45min

The Mother of All Energy Crises | Ep253: Fatih Birol

The news agenda this year has been entirely dominated by energy related stories, whether it's the war in Europe being pursued by Russia — formerly Europe's most significant energy provider — the U.S. ...

15 Huhti 27min

⁠Energy Shocks, Inflation & Risk: How a Central Bank Responds to Crisis | Ep252: Pierre Wunsch

How should a central bank respond to energy shocks? Will high oil and gas prices bolster the uptake of renewables? And what is the true cost of net zero 2050? This week on Cleaning Up, host Michael Li...

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Can We Cool The Planet, And Should We Try? | Ep251: Ricken Patel

What happens if we’re underestimating the speed and scale of climate risk? This week on Cleaning Up, Bryony Worthington sits down with Ricken Patel, Principal at Climate Hub & Founder of activist netw...

1 Huhti 1h 7min

Heavy Engineering Solutions for High-Emission Problems | Ep250: Emmanouil Kakaras

This week on Cleaning Up, Michael Liebreich is joined by Emmanouil Kakaras, engineer, academic, and Senior Advisor at Mitsubishi Heavy Industries EMEA, for a grounded, technical conversation about the...

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Can We Stop Data Centres Breaking The Grid? Ep249: Varun Sivaram & Steve Smith

This week on Cleaning Up, host Michael Liebreich sits down with Varun Sivaram and Steve Smith to explore one of the most urgent, and overlooked, challenges of the AI revolution: how to power it withou...

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