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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