Elestor’s CEO Guido Dalessi to depart by year-end

Guido Dalessi, chief executive officer (CEO) of Dutch long-duration electricity storage company Elestor, will step down from his role as CEO at the end of 2024. “I am leaving Elestor in the knowledge that the company I helped create is in safe hands. I will stay on as shareholder but will hand over the reins to my colleague Hylke van Bennekom, then maximise my contribution to the energy transition as a non-executive supervisory board member and active advisor to small and large companies.”

Jacob Ruiter, Executive Board Member of Elestor investor EIT InnoEnergy and CEO for the Benelux region, said: “Guido and his colleagues have created an extraordinary company with tremendous growth potential in a sector that is crucial to the energy transition. We would like to express our sincere gratitude to him for his leadership in laying these foundations and wish him continued success. We look forward to continuing our close partnership with Hylke and the Elestor team.”

Robert Blom, Vice President Vopak Ventures, the corporate venture capital division of the world’s leading tank storage company, said: “Dalessi has successfully led Elestor through years of groundbreaking scientific research and development that has delivered tangible results. The company is now ready to enter an engineering phase that is set to make it a major force behind the energy transition. We are looking forward to be part of it.”

Chief operations officer (COO) Hylke van Bennekom will take over as CEO on 1 January 2025. “Guido and I have not only worked well together for years, but we’ve also cooperated closely for some time to ensure a smooth handover. I am honoured to take over the baton and ready to hit the ground running.”

Wiebrand Kout, Elestor’s founder and chief technology officer, said: “When Guido joined and invested in Elestor back in 2015, he brought a much-needed business focus to complement my scientific thinking. “Under his inspiring leadership, we built a company that aims to become a cornerstone of a new, clean and robust energy system that is destined to deliver clean air, green jobs and economic growth in the years and decades ahead. I am immensely grateful for everything he’s done.”

About Elestor

The Dutch based company Elestor BV has introduced an innovative electricity storage technology for large scale stationary applications, based on hydrogen flow battery technology. With this, the electricity storage costs (aka Levelized Cost of Storage) are reduced to an absolute minimum.

Low cost, abundant and environmentally friendly materials are used, combined with a patented system design and easy to manufacture and compact cells. This triple cost reduction strategy enables viable business cases in the LDES (‘Long Duration Electricity Storage’) domain, essential to stimulate the adoption of electricity storage and accelerate the energy transition.

In the end game the technology has the potential to substitute gas-fired power plants at GWh scale in the form of a ‘bi-directional power plants’, and has all the properties to become the equivalent in LDES of what Lithium ion is today for mobility.

Elestor is named as one of the 10 most innovative companies in the Netherlands, in an assessment of 600 companies. The Dutch Innovation Award is an initiative of the Amsterdam Centre for Business Innovation (University of Amsterdam).

In 2022, Elestor concluded a 30M€ Series A investment in a round led by Equinor, with also Vopak, Invest-NL and Somerset Capital Partners joining the investors team.

Press contact:       

E-mail      info@elestor.com

Tel             06 53 729 759