Season 2 | Episode 4 | Rooftops to Gigawatts: Yvonne Strzys Reshaping German Solar

Yvonne Strzys didn’t plan to spend her career in solar but a rooftop system she spotted at a friend’s house in 1999 set everything in motion.Today she’s Head of Project Development at MaxSolar GmbH, leading a Berlin office that scaled from 3 to 30 people in three years, overseeing a pipeline of ground-mounted solar and multi-utility projects across Germany.In this conversation Yvonne gets honest about what the German renewable energy market actually looks like from the inside the grid connection bottlenecks, the influx of international competition, the maturity that comes with economic pressure, and why the industry’s next chapter has to be built on collaboration.She also speaks candidly about navigating engineering as a woman, the value of community through programs like Women of New Energy, and what she looks for when building teams people genuinely want to stay in. A thoughtful, grounded conversation about the realities of project development in one of Europe’s most active solar markets.In this episode: ∙ The engineer-to-developer career transition and why it’s an advantage ∙ Germany’s grid connection landscape in 2026 ∙ Scaling from rooftop to large-scale ground-mounted solar ∙ Building and retaining diverse teams in a competitive market ∙ Multi-utility projects: solar, wind and battery working together ∙ Her advice to young women entering engineering todayThe Renewable Energy Movement Podcast is powered by Kigyo.