Steve Smith has expanded his role at National Grid Partners to become the energy utility group's new chief strategy and regulation officer.
Energy utility National Grid has promoted Steve Smith, formerly president of corporate venture arm National Grid Partners (NGP) to chief strategy and regulation officer.
The NGP team will continue to to report to Smith, with Pradeep Tagare overseeing NGP’s venture investment activity as vice-president and head of investments. Ian Cooper heads the corporate venture capital for the unit in Europe.
Smith came to National Grid in 2021 as head of strategy, innovation and market analytics, moving to president of NGP in February this year. His latest role involves him replacing Ben Wilson, who is set to head up National Grid Ventures, the company’s large-scale clean energy infrastructure division.
NGP has invested in more than 50 startups since it was founded in 2018, including industrial cybersecurity platform developer Dragos, infrastructure maintenance software producer Sitetracker and Uniphore, which provides enterprise AI transformation technology.
Smith told Global Corporate Venturing earlier this year the unit was concentrating less on power generation or decarbonisation in favour of technology that can facilitate the energy transition, help customers make the same leap, decarbonise gas networks or integrate digital and edge technologies into its core business.
