Julian Popov, minister of environment of Bulgaria, is an expert on low carbon economy and energy security in South East Europe. He is ECF Fellow, Chairman BPIE, Energy Security Adviser to the Bulgarian President. Founding Vice Chancellor of the New Bulgarian University, Founding Board Member of the Institute of Sustainable Transition and Development, Former Chairman of the Bulgarian School of Politics.

We talked gas dependency and Ukraine war.

Raul Cazan

Andris Piebalgs is former European Commissioner for Energy (Barroso I) and for Development (Barroso II), currently with the prestigious Florence School of Regulation (European University Institute) in Fiesole, Italy.

For what we were interested in this dialogue, it was noteworthy that Piebalgs was the Chair of the International Methane Emissions Observatory (IMEO) Implementation Committee. We talked international politics of methane and the energy facet of the war in Ukraine.

Raul Cazan

Ilaria Conti is Head of Gas at the Florence School of Regulation.

Her main fields of expertise concern EU institutional relations and EU electricity and gas regulation.

She spent about 9 years in Brussels, working for the the Permanent Representation of Italy at the EU, the United Nations and, from 2005 until 2013, for EFET, the “European Federation of Energy Traders” covering various positions within the association.

Professor Conti joined the Florence School of Regulation (FSR) in 2015 as Energy Policy Deputy and in 2017 she was appointed Head of the new FSR Gas area.

She is author and co-author of many scientific articles and position papers, actually, until 8 years ago she was the Managing Editor of the publication “Economics of Energy & Environmental Policy” that belongs to the International Association for Energy Economics.

We met in 2022 in qualities of master and disciple (I was the student, obviously) at the European University Institute in Florence – in the beautiful little town of Fiesole up on the hills west of Florence - where you, professor, were part of the teaching staff in a course that dealt with high quality regulation in areas such as climate and energy.

Raul Cazan