Our Team
David Connolly, CEO
David Connolly is the current Chairperson of the Irish District Energy Association, which he co-founded in 2017. He previously worked as an Associate Professor in Aalborg University Denmark, where he specialised in national energy planning and in particular the potential for district heating across Europe.
David led the Heat Roadmap Europe project which underpinned the first Heating & Cooling Strategy ever developed by the European Commission. He returned to Ireland from Denmark in 2017 and went on to become the CEO of Wind Energy Ireland, Ireland’s largest energy association.
Recently, David was CTO for Astatine, a company which developed turnkey solutions for large industrial customers across solar PV and high-temperature heat pumps, including the delivery of Ireland (and the UK’s) first ever heat pump to supply over 100°C.
Asper Investment Management is a specialist investment management firm, focused on building the new sustainable infrastructure businesses. Asper’s team has been working together for more than a decade: initially as part of the London-based investment firm Hg, and since 2017 as an independent firm entirely owned by its management.
The head office is in London, and Asper's team is also operating from the Netherlands and Luxembourg. Asper create value by investing in high quality real assets, particularly in district heating and wind energy, by actively managing them and by building dynamic, thriving businesses around them. This approach is called platform building, and it is at the core of Asper’s investment strategy.
Asper grows platforms asset by asset, person by person, to fully industrial scale, which creates value by unlocking synergies and economies of scale, attracting and retaining the strongest management teams and making our platforms sought-after crown jewels in their markets.