Ruggero Schleicher-Tappeser
Net zero commitments are now sitting on top of supply chains, capital plans and industrial policy that were not designed to deliver them. Boards are asked to allocate against energy and climate scenarios they do not control, while European industrial capacity in critical clean-tech segments has thinned to the point of strategic exposure. The decision is no longer whether to act on the transition. It is how to act without misreading the technology curves, the policy direction, or the geography of supply.
Ruggero Schleicher-Tappeser is a physicist, policy strategist and former Acting Secretary General of the Alpine Convention who helps boards and policymakers read the energy transition as an industrial and capital question, not a communications one.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Ruggero Schleicher-Tappeser
- He reads the technology stack underneath the energy transition with a physicist’s precision: why photovoltaics keeps falling in cost, where power electronics and battery chemistry are going next, and what this implies for capital plans that assume a slower curve.
- He has run the policy machinery, not just commented on it. As Acting Secretary General of the Alpine Convention he negotiated across eight national governments on a treaty that links climate, transport and spatial planning.
- He led the European xGWp effort to rebuild gigawatt-scale photovoltaic manufacturing, which gives him an operating view of why European clean-tech capacity collapsed and what it would take to rebuild any of it.
- He combines this with thirty years of regional and EU policy work through the EURES Institute he founded in Freiburg, so the analysis lands at the level boards actually act on: investment, location, regulation, time horizon.
Biography highlights
- Founder and director of the EURES Institute for Regional Studies in Europe, Freiburg, for fifteen years from 1989.
- Acting Secretary General of the Alpine Convention, 2004 to 2007.
- Consultant to the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) in its formative period.
- Coordinator of the European xGWp / European Gigawatt Fab initiative to rebuild European PV manufacturing, 2013 to 2015.
- Co-author of “European Transport Policy and Sustainable Mobility” (Routledge, 2000) and “Nachhaltigkeit trotz Globalisierung” (1998, with Christian Hey).
- Trained physicist (Diplom Physiker, Switzerland); writes and consults from Berlin in German, English, Italian and French.
Biography
The energy transition is being treated by many leadership teams as a communications and reporting problem. It is in fact an industrial, technological and capital allocation problem, and the gap between the two framings is widening. That gap is the territory Ruggero Schleicher-Tappeser has worked in for four decades.
His starting point is unusual. He trained as a physicist in Switzerland, then spent fifteen years building and running the EURES Institute for Regional Studies in Europe, a Freiburg think tank that worked through how energy, transport and spatial policy actually combine at regional level. From there he moved into multilateral practice as Acting Secretary General of the Alpine Convention from 2004 to 2007, the international treaty body covering sustainable development across the Alpine states.
The industrial chapter of the work followed. Between 2013 and 2015 he coordinated xGWp, a European initiative that brought together the main European solar research institutes and the world’s largest PV equipment manufacturer to attempt to rebuild gigawatt-scale photovoltaic manufacturing in Europe. He has also advised the International Renewable Energy Agency in its development phase. The published work, including “European Transport Policy and Sustainable Mobility” (Routledge, 2000) and “Nachhaltigkeit trotz Globalisierung” (1998, with Christian Hey), runs along the same line.
What this gives a board room is rare. Most speakers on energy and climate either describe the policy or sell the technology. Schleicher-Tappeser explains why the cost curve of photovoltaics is structural rather than accidental, why the next decade of the transition will be decided by power electronics and battery chemistry as much as by any climate summit, and what European industrial exposure looks like once those facts are taken seriously.
Key speaking topics
- Energy transition and decarbonisation strategy
- The economics and physics of photovoltaics
- European industrial policy and clean-tech manufacturing
- Climate policy and capital allocation
- Sustainable transport and mobility
- Regional and multilateral sustainability governance
Ideal for
- Boards and executive committees of energy, utility and industrial companies setting capital allocation against transition scenarios
- Policy and regulatory leaders in European institutions, national ministries and regional authorities
- Investors and asset owners with material exposure to clean-tech supply chains and energy infrastructure
- Sustainability and strategy leaders translating climate commitments into operating and procurement decisions
Audience outcomes
- A clearer reading of why photovoltaic costs continue to fall and what that means for adjacent technologies
- A working view of the four technology pillars (photovoltaics, power electronics, batteries, semiconductors) shaping the next phase of the transition
- A sharper sense of European industrial exposure in clean-tech and what credible responses look like
- A grounded policy-and-capital frame for setting net zero ambition against actual delivery constraints
- A line of sight from regional policy mechanics to multilateral treaty practice, useful to leaders working across both
Talks
A talk on solar electricity as the central climate solution and on the institutional and cultural resistance to abandoning combustion as the basis of the energy system.
Key takeaways:
- Why the move away from combustion is a structural shift, not an incremental one
- Where resistance to that shift sits inside institutions, infrastructure and habit
- What this means for industrial and capital plans that still assume a thermal core
A talk on electricity as the principal motor of economic development and on the power struggles that have shaped its institutional form.
Key takeaways:
- How electricity reshaped industrial and political power over the twentieth century
- Why control of the electricity system is again contested in the transition
- What this implies for utilities, regulators and large industrial users
A talk on the four technologies (photovoltaics, power electronics, batteries, semiconductors) that together carry most of the climate solution space.
Key takeaways:
- Why these four technologies reinforce each other on cost and performance
- What investment and policy decisions follow from taking that reinforcement seriously
- Where the European position is weak and where it is still defensible
A talk on the structural drivers behind PV cost reduction and the competitive consequences for energy markets.
Key takeaways:
- The learning curve and manufacturing dynamics behind PV cost decline
- Why the cost trajectory is unlikely to plateau on current expectations
- What a genuinely cheap PV system implies for grid, storage and industrial demand