People
Jeremy Taylor – Managing director
Jeremy entered the power sector with Mark Jones seven years ago. Starting with a green biomass power station in northern England, in 2010 they negotiated a contract to build and operate 220MW of power stations for National Grid PLC. Jeremy led the fundraising in the City of London, successfully raising a blend of equity, junior and senior debt on a project-finance basis.
Now valued at more than £300million, the group now has a range of fast‑expanding power-related businesses, which include one of the UK’s leading gas-fuelled construction projects.
Jeremy handles our interface with political, regulatory and industrial associations. He has worked closely with DECC and National Grid on the Electricity Market Reform, advising on policy and its implementation and on its detailed contractual arrangements. He consults on new regulatory proposals from Ofgem, before and after their publication.
Prior to life in the power sector he founded a 13,000‐acre agricultural project in Sierra Leone, which raised US$16million to develop land and build agricultural processing plant.
Mark Jones – Managing director
A Chartered Civil Engineer, Mark was awarded a first class degree in engineering by Liverpool University. He worked for civil engineering firms in the UK and Middle East before setting up and running his own construction businesses spanning the UK, the Middle East and the Caribbean.
Mark has built more conventional power capacity in the UK in the past five years than any other British company. The group currently has 750MW of new gas-fired capacity in development.
Mark manages every aspect of the design of our power stations, liaising with our structural engineers, civil engineers and plant manufactures. He oversees our permitting applications and speaks at their associated public consultations. He organises working and detailed budgets for the construction programme and ensures that they are kept to. Mark personally project-manages the construction of our power stations and substations, with the result that every one has been built within time and under budget.
He set up and now directs our successful high-voltage electrical network business, which designs and installs connections to the grid. Our O&M company services a nationwide range of power stations.
Earlier in his career he was a Senior Tournament Director with the Professional Golfers’ Association, responsible for staging two Ryder Cup matches.
Dr Stephen Coulson – Technical director
Stephen has a background in nuclear reactor analysis and project management in the defence and civil nuclear industries.
He has an MSc in Nuclear Reactor Physics & Technology and a PhD in Mathematics. He lectured in mathematics at Cardiff University and the Open University. He has worked on nuclear programmes for the Ministry of Defence and for the civil reactor industry. Recently, he has been advising the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and the Ministry of Defence (MOD) on nuclear issues, including security of nuclear information and its safeguards. Through this work Stephen is experienced in applying UK and international safety and security standards to nuclear programmes and in working with nuclear regulatory authorities.
Stephen has assisted the MOD with information security and authored the MOD’s official guidance on the classification of sensitive nuclear information. In this role he worked extensively with the Office of Civil Nuclear Security (OCNS) in the UK and with the Department of the Environment (DoE) in the US to provide information‐security advice to civil nuclear operators. He created a framework to enable nuclear regulators on both sides of the Atlantic to peer-review each other’s work.
In the civil nuclear industry Stephen has developed computational codes to predict the behavior of pressurized-water reactors and has advised on risk and safety management for nuclear development programmes. He has conducted critical reviews of safety case methodology and probabilistic safety assessments to support nuclear site licence applications. Recently, he provided training to the United Arab Emirates’ nuclear regulator on creating a nuclear safety culture within their organisation.
He is a member of the Nuclear Academic Industrial Liaison Committee, which co‑ordinates research between the nuclear and academic sectors and is a member of the steering committee for the nuclear physics MSc course at Birmingham University.
A reserve officer with the rank of Major in the British Army and previously with the Royal Air Force, Stephen has seen active service in Afghanistan, Iraq and the Balkans.
Philip Hannah – Resilience director
Philip Hannah is a graduate of Cambridge University and a former officer in the British Army’s Brigade of Gurkhas. During his military service Philip led soldiers on operations in the Balkans and engaged in military planning and intelligence operations in Afghanistan and Asia.
Since leaving the British Army Philip has established himself as one of the foremost experts in the field of nuclear security and resilience in the UK. Philip holds the unique position of being a trusted advisor to both the civil and the defence nuclear programmes in the UK. He designed and now teaches the Threat & Vulnerability Analysis Peer Review (TVAPR) methodology on behalf of the UK Ministry of Defence and was also responsible for the doctrine used by the armed response of the Ministry of Defence Police to protect the UK’s nuclear deterrent. As an advisor to the UK civil nuclear industry Philip was responsible for the first Potential Adversary Force (PADFOR) planning document for UK duty holders and he has developed a number of papers and Best Practice Guides for the World Institute for Nuclear Security (WINS). Most recently Philip has been supporting the UK Office for Nuclear Regulation (ONR) by leading on the project to revise the entirety of the UK’s civil nuclear security regulations.
Andrew Buglass - Finance director
Andrew is finance director of GF Nuclear. A developer and financier of large-scale energy projects since 1992, his experience spans projects in over 30 countries, where he has been responsible for the delivery more than £11billion of energy investment. From 2009 to 2014, Andrew was managing director of Royal Bank of Scotland’s energy and infrastructure team in London. Under his leadership his department financed £1.8billion of projects and became the leading lender to the UK’s renewables sector.
Before joining RBS Andrew ran ING Bank’s EMEA utilities and power team, which delivered new business in excess of €6billion transaction value across all major power technologies and diverse markets.
Outside the banking sector Andrew worked for Unocal and Powergen PLC. Mainly based in the Far East, he negotiated and structured specialized development finance for energy projects across the region, including Indonesia’s first ever deep‑water oil & gas project and the award-winning 1,220MW Jawa Power coal‑fired station.
Andrew is co-chair of the Low Carbon Finance Group. He is a regular expert contributor to government and industry groups on policy and financing issues: he undertook extensive collaboration at senior and ministerial level with Department of Energy and Climate Change on Electricity Market Reform, including giving evidence before Parliamentary Select Committees in Westminster and Edinburgh. He has recently been Special Advisor to the House of Commons Energy & Climate Change Select Committee for their inquiry on investor confidence.
Professor John Nolan – Civil engineering director
Professor Nolan is Chairman of Nolan Associates the Civil and Structural Engineering consultancy that he founded. His projects span every sector of the built environment, including heavy industrial facilities such as steelworks and power stations. His practice has designed all of the group’s power stations to date.
He is a Fellow of the Institution of Civil Engineers and also of the Institution of Structural Engineers, where he was President in 2012. He is also Royal Academy of Engineering visiting Professor of Innovation in the Engineering Department of the University of Birmingham and Deputy Chairman / Chairman Elect of the Construction Industry Council (CIC), which represents 500,000 professionals working in the built environment. He represents CIC on the Strategic Forum for Construction, which coordinates and represents the views of the UK construction industry.