$20B of Projects: Alexis Gonzalez on Infrastructure Leadership

Alexis Gonzalez graduated as a mechanical engineer in Venezuela in 2001 and walked straight into one of the biggest petrochemical projects in the country’s history. That early exposure to scale and complexity shaped everything that followed.Over the next 25 years he worked his way through oil and gas, biofuel, offshore wind, hydro and now data center infrastructure. He has managed over $20 billion worth of projects, led teams spread across nine different countries and built a career defined by one consistent belief: that nothing is impossible if you have the right team.He is now Director of Project Controls at Andritz in Montreal, working on the refurbishment of hydro power facilities across North America that were built 50 to 100 years ago and now need a new generation of turbines.In this conversation with Tom Essex, Alexis reflects on everything the journey has taught him, and shares a candid read on where the data center and energy industries are heading, he talks about: ∙ Starting in Venezuela’s oil and gas mega projects and what that teaches you about scale ∙ A biofuel project in Canada that turned garbage into ethanol ∙ Supporting Horn Sea 2 for Ørsted, one of the world’s biggest offshore wind farms ∙ What Nordic work culture gets right that North America does not ∙ The transformer lead time problem quietly threatening the data center boom ∙ Why some hyperscaler projects will not survive to the end of the decade ∙ China’s nuclear and hydro infrastructure play and what the US might learn from it ∙ Why retention is always a byproduct of culture and not of salaryThe Renewable Energy Movement Podcast is powered by Kigyo.