Recharge with Adam Carabetta — Asia's Infrastructure and Energy Leaders

Adam "The Ace" Carabetta
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Raw, honest conversations with the people building Asia's infrastructure and energy future, and the bold moves that got them there. Hosted by Adam "The Ace" Carabetta, founder of executive search firm Formative, with 18 years in the sector. Guests include Gavin Adda (Peak Energy), Cindy Lim (Keppel Infrastructure), Henning Gloystein (Eurasia Group), Jennifer Tay (PwC) and Steve Melhuish (100x100). Every few episodes we go Off Grid with a wildcard guest to talk the bigger stuff. Loneliness, mental health, geopolitics, AI, and what actually matters. Follow so you don't miss who's on next.

  1. Oct 15

    Episode 32 — Anger Is a Fuel with Assaad Razzouk (CEO of Gurīn Energy and Host of The Angry Clean Energy Guy Podcast)

    Assaad Razzouk has been The Angry Clean Energy Guy for seven years. He’s still angry, and he says that’s the point. A former investment banker turned clean energy builder, Assaad has spent two decades developing renewables across Asia, first with Sindicatum and now as CEO of Gurīn Energy, developing solar, wind and battery projects across North and Southeast Asia. In this episode, he tells me one of my questions belongs in the 1980s, and makes the case that renewables are in the best position they’ve ever been. We cover:→ Why electricity, not chips or data centres, is the Achilles heel of the AI boom→ Where oil majors’ record profits are really going→ Why he sees no future for nuclear fission or green hydrogen at scale→ Energy as sovereignty, and why Asian governments are racing to diversify→ Why he’d be shocked to see petrol cars on sale in Southeast Asia by 2030 Recharge features Asia’s infrastructure and energy leaders, hosted by Adam Carabetta, Founder of Formative. Listen to Assaad’s podcast: The Angry Clean Energy Guy

  2. Sep 15

    Episode 31 — 3 Billion People Have Nowhere to Put Their Trash with Jacob Duer (CEO, Alliance to End Plastic Waste)

    Jacob Duer spent 23 years inside the United Nations. The final chapter of that career ended with him locked in a conference room in Geneva for 48 hours straight, negotiating with 195 governments — finishing at 6am on a Saturday to land the Minamata Convention, a legally binding global treaty on mercury pollution. In 2019, he walked away from all of it to become the founding CEO of the Alliance to End Plastic Waste — a Singapore-based, industry-funded non-profit backed by companies across the entire plastics value chain, from resin producers to retailers. In this episode, Jacob unpacks why 3 billion people on the planet still have no organised waste collection, why "flexibles" — chip packets, films, plastic bags — are the real crisis (not bottles), why regulation alone was never going to solve this, and why he still believes plastic pollution is solvable in our lifetime. We also get into the global plastics treaty governments are set to negotiate again in March, and what a genuinely enabling version of that treaty needs to unlock. Do we have a hope in the future of managing plastic waste? Listen to this conversation to find out.

  3. Aug 18

    Episode 30 — One Line He Never Crossed with Allard Nooy (Ex-CEO of InfraCo & Global Infrastructure Advisor)

    Allard Nooy is a true infrastructure veteran and a legend in Asia's energy industry. He has spent over 30 years building infrastructure across Asia's toughest markets. From a startup posting across Vietnam in 1994, the year the country opened to foreign investment, to nine years as CEO of InfraCo Asia, where his team closed 40 project joint ventures across 12 countries. Allard talks through the line he set early and never crossed on corruption in emerging markets, the leadership philosophy behind three decades of managing teams in the region, and the story behind Vietnam's first utility-scale solar project which was a $30M bet built entirely on InfraCo's own balance sheet before a single bank would commit. He also shares some insights on where the region needs to go next as the next frontier of Infrastructure comes to light for Asia. Listen and meet the man, the myth, the legend - Allard Nooy.

  4. Jul 30

    Episode 29 — Let's Talk About Loneliness with Simone Heng (Author, Speaker & Human Connection Expert)

    Simone Heng spent 15 years in radio across Australia, Dubai and Singapore. Good job, visible job, and one she stayed in far longer than she should have — being bullied by a direct manager, masking daily, in an industry that trained her to care about how she looked rather than what she thought. She left, wrote Let's Talk About Loneliness, and now works as an author, speaker and human connection expert. Fortune 500s fly her in to talk to their people about a problem most organisations are paying for without ever naming it. Why loneliness shows up in attrition numbers before it shows up anywhere else. Why the loneliest people in a company are usually the ones who got promoted — separated from the peers they could be honest with, managing the people they can't confide in, and often unable to take it home either. Why CEO clubs and peer masterminds exist at all. Simone's position on leadership is a sharp one: at work, stop trying to be vulnerable. Be relatable. They're not the same thing, and confusing them costs leaders credibility. We also get into why busyness is the most socially acceptable anaesthetic available, and how the wellness internet's language of boundaries — protect your peace, no bandwidth, trauma dumping — is quietly teaching a generation how not to connect.

  5. Jul 7

    Episode 28 — You Can't Be Satisfied With This with Sam Yamdagni (Founder & CEO, PSS Powers)

    Sam Yamdagni grew up in Thailand, studied engineering at IIT, and spent his early career watching energy get consumed at a scale most people never see — pump houses drawing a gigawatt of power, one pump at a time. That experience flipped something in him. Not a climate awakening. A business one. He started PSS Powers with his own money, built his first solar plants in Thailand, and was just starting to feel comfortable — good returns, organic growth, thinking about slowing down — when his uncle flew in from Stockholm to see what he'd built. Standing in front of the panels, his uncle looked at him and said: "Sam, you can't be satisfied with this." What followed was a phone call, two Indian cities, a glass of wine, and a target that sounded completely fake: 3.2 gigawatts. Today, with $300 million committed through a JV with I Squared Capital, 200MW delivered in the last 18 months, and teams of 50 in Thailand and 35 in India — it doesn't sound fake anymore. In this conversation, Sam opens up about the decade of building before anyone was watching, why he's not a climate guy and why that actually makes him more credible, and what it costs personally to go from "this is quite nice" to "we need to solve a national-scale problem." We also get into the real story of India — why it's the most compelling renewable energy market in Asia right now and also the most complex, the nuances of executing across states with different policies and grid operators carrying a billion dollars in debt, and why batteries are the next massive wave coming. And Sam makes a point that cuts through the noise: the energy transition isn't just about what gets generated. The cheapest decarbonisation in Asia isn't a new solar plant — it's the electricity you're already wasting.

  6. Jun 9

    Episode 27 — You Need One Deal to Go Wrong with Marat Zapparov (CEO, Pentagreen Capital)

    Marat Zapparov didn't plan to end up in infrastructure finance. Born in Moscow, schooled in the UK, and armed with an accounting qualification he wasn't sure he wanted — he stumbled into the world of project finance at HSBC Hong Kong just as the GFC was tearing through London. That pivot changed everything. What followed was 15 years of building at the sharp end of Asian infrastructure — from HSBC's project finance team in Hong Kong, to Clifford Capital in Singapore's early days to the IFC, and finally to co-founding Pentagreen Capital — a debt financing platform backed by HSBC and Temasek to solve one of Asia's most stubborn problems: getting private capital into sustainable infrastructure in markets where others won't go. In this conversation, Marat opens up about what it really takes to operate in frontier markets — Bangladesh, Myanmar, the Philippines — where the deals are harder, the risks are real, and the rewards for getting it right are significant. He shares the principle that stuck with him from early in his career: you need at least one deal to go wrong. If you've never had one, you've never pushed the boundary. We get into the state of development finance and whether multilaterals like the IFC are still fit for purpose in 2026, why Trump cutting USAID funding has raised uncomfortable questions about where the money actually goes, and what blended finance can — and can't — do to close Asia's infrastructure gap. Marat also gives his take on where the biggest opportunities in Asian infrastructure are right now: data centres, energy security, and why the answer is never as simple as just picking one sector and going all in.

  7. May 25

    Episode 26 — View from the Peak with Gavin Adda (CEO, Peak Energy)

    Six years ago, Gavin Adda was Episode 1 of Recharge. Back then he was two years into launching TotalEnergies' rooftop solar business across Asia. This week he came back. In between: 350 projects across 13 countries, a 30%+ exit IRR on the sale to Eneos, a move to run TotalEnergies' $15 billion utility-scale portfolio, and then — in 2023 — raising $450 million from Stonepeak to build Peak Energy from scratch. Five people to 150 in two years. 500MW operating. 2GW in development across Japan, Korea, Australia, Philippines, and beyond. But this conversation goes well beyond the highlights reel. Adam opens up about growing up in the 90s — teachers telling him we had 10 years of oil left. Then 20. Now somehow 50. Oil company profits at record highs, more coal burning across Asia, and a transition that feels two steps forward, one step back. He puts it to Gavin straight: what is actually going on? Gavin's answer is disarmingly honest. He doesn't pretend the transition is clean or linear. He talks about the pendulum that has swung back and forth for 50 years, why ideology-driven investing almost killed renewable credibility, and why the real driver of the clean energy boom isn't ESG — it's economics and energy security. The Philippines government couldn't operate for a day because of blackouts. Korea and Japan are tearing up their own processes just to get power built faster. That's the real story. We also get into why Trump accidentally accelerated battery storage by killing EV subsidies, how battery costs have fallen 50% year on year, what it actually takes to build a business from zero with no brand name, and why Gavin thinks the question of running out of oil is the wrong one entirely. Same guest. Same podcast. Completely different world.

  8. May 15

    Episode 25 — From the Factory Floor to the Energy Frontier: Building Asia's Clean Power Future with Jian Ming Cheang (Director APAC, EDF)

    Jian Ming Cheang didn't plan his career — he reacted to the world changing around him. A chemical engineer who graduated as oil and gas prices crashed in 2014-15, he made a deliberate pivot into renewables at a time when most of his peers were heading in the opposite direction. What followed was 15 years of building from the ground up — engineer to commercial, Singapore to London to Melbourne and back — culminating in a role shaping how one of the world's largest energy companies bets on Asia's clean power future. In this conversation, we trace the real story behind that journey. Jian Ming opens up about being thrust into a leadership role in Australia — tasked with building EDF's business from scratch in a market he barely knew — and what it actually felt like to figure it out on the ground: the visa issues, the office leases, the housing search, all the unglamorous stuff that comes before the €50 million investment headline. We go deep on the energy mix — why nuclear is quietly back on the table across Southeast Asia, why hydrogen remains more promise than reality, what Australia's "duck curve" problem tells us about the limits of renewables, and why Jian Ming believes the region is heading toward more oil and gas activity, not less — regardless of what the transition narrative says. We also talk about Singapore's national service, analysis paralysis vs. doing the hard thing, and why the people most equipped to lead change are often the ones who were first burned by the old system. This is a grounded, no-fluff conversation about energy, ambition, and what it really takes to build something in markets that don't yet exist.

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Raw, honest conversations with the people building Asia's infrastructure and energy future, and the bold moves that got them there. Hosted by Adam "The Ace" Carabetta, founder of executive search firm Formative, with 18 years in the sector. Guests include Gavin Adda (Peak Energy), Cindy Lim (Keppel Infrastructure), Henning Gloystein (Eurasia Group), Jennifer Tay (PwC) and Steve Melhuish (100x100). Every few episodes we go Off Grid with a wildcard guest to talk the bigger stuff. Loneliness, mental health, geopolitics, AI, and what actually matters. Follow so you don't miss who's on next.

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