The “angry clean energy guy” leading Gurīn Energy and why his brand of impatience is accelerating solar’s rise

This story is one of nine on The Peak Singapore’s Power List. The list is an annual recognition that celebrates and acknowledges individuals who have demonstrated exceptional leadership, influence, and impact.

The theme for the class of 2025 is Vanguards, spotlighting business leaders who are boldly reshaping their industries, questioning outdated norms, and pushing boundaries with vision and conviction. At a time when conformity is often rewarded and change met with resistance, these individuals choose to lead from the front — not for applause, but because the future demands it.

There is a certain impatience in Assaad Razzouk’s manner. It is not the restlessness of a contrarian nor the weariness of a cynic — but something closer to the urgency of a man who has seen too many decades squandered by easy excuses.

If the Power List seeks to spotlight those who shift paradigms by sheer force of vision, then Razzouk, CEO of Gurīn Energy, is the prototype. His is the work of the vanguard: audacious, rooted in fact, and unwilling to wait for permission from the status quo.

He starts with a broken myth: “It’s that renewable energy is expensive and has to be subsidised.” The truth, he points out, is stark. “Solar energy is now the cheapest form of energy in history, yet countries continue to subsidise the production and burning of coal, oil and gas to the tune of $7 trillion, or 7.1 per cent of global gross domestic product each year, according to the International Monetary Fund. That’s more than $11 million every minute of every day paid to Big Oil to worsen the climate crisis and pollute the air that goes into our lungs.”

The data is relentless. A 2021 Oxford paper found that solar, wind, and battery costs have fallen exponentially — about 10 per cent a year for decades — with solar power now “2,000 times cheaper compared to when it first entered commercial use in 1958”.

This exponential cost reduction has profound implications. “If we continue deploying solar, wind, batteries and hydrogen electrolysers at the current exponentially increasing rate throughout this decade, we can achieve a near-net-zero emissions energy system within just 25 years. In contrast, a slower transition would be more expensive.”

The International Energy Agency, he adds, failed to predict the speed of this drop for 20 years straight because “these multiple energy models neither accounted for the effect of Moore’s Law nor Wright’s Law”.

The case for urgency

Beneath the statistics, Razzouk’s argument is essentially philosophical in nature. He aims the assumption that humanity can coast, that the climate crisis will play out in slow motion, or that “some magical, technological solution” will save us in the end.

“This couldn’t be more false. The climate crisis is already here and will only worsen because the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, measured in parts per million, is still rising. The challenge matters because the climate crisis is existential — we can’t survive without a habitable climate on this planet.”

The antidote, he says, is colossal yet straightforward in its implications: “There are really only two big, macro solutions to the climate crisis. One is fighting deforestation. And the second is deploying renewable energy to power everything in the world, including electricity. Gurīn Energy is doing our bit on the second by supporting the energy transition in Asia.”

Founded in 2021, Gurīn Energy now fields a team of 90 across Singapore, Japan, South Korea, Thailand, the Philippines, and Indonesia, working on solar, wind, and energy storage projects. The ambition is already outpacing the original plan. “Our pipeline is five times bigger than what we’d expected, in terms of megawatts under development, for example.”

This translates to projects no one dared imagine four years ago. “Our solar-plus-storage project in Indonesia is one of the largest of its kind in the world and will help spur the development of the country’s clean tech supply chains and industries. At the same time, it’ll be trading clean power with neighbouring, resource-poor Singapore and advancing the vision of an ASEAN power grid. We’re also developing one of Japan’s largest stand-alone energy storage projects to ease the curtailment of renewable energy.”

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Abundance over scarcity

If the energy transition still feels out of reach to the average person, Razzouk is quick to pinpoint why. The barrier is not technological but psychological: decades of fossil fuel dominance have created a deep-rooted scepticism that renewables can ever truly deliver.

For him, this belief has long since expired. He reminds me that even the International Energy Agency, hardly known for radical optimism, conceded in 2020 that “solar energy is now the cheapest form of energy in the history of the world, period.” Yet, despite this watershed moment, the sense of urgency has yet to spread to the broader public.

“There’s this lingering idea that the energy transition is some distant, unproven experiment,” Razzouk says, “when, in fact, we’re in the middle of a climate crisis, countries are facing energy security challenges, and fossil fuels are both finite and expensive.” For him, the logic for change is blindingly obvious — “the energy transition is common sense and also urgent”.

He traces the arc of progress in numbers: the rate of renewable adoption is not only exponential but accelerating. If that pace holds, he says, “this deep transformation of the energy sector globally will deliver quasi-total clean energy everywhere by 2040 or before.”

The significance is profound. With such rapid deployment of solar, wind, and batteries, we are on the cusp of having more clean power than we consume in a steady state, unlocking what Razzouk describes as “an abundance of power”. It’s a future defined by possibility, not constraint.

A new way of thinking

Still, for Razzouk, the real breakthrough is a shift in collective mindset — the willingness to act at the speed that science, technology, and the planet now demand. The path, he believes, is already in sight; the world need only commit to walking it.

He sees in the present moment the beginnings of a shift as fundamental as digitisation. “Technological disruption isn’t linear. Information technology has created an almost infinite abundance of binary digits (bits), which have replaced and complemented finite physical, tangible, and analogue products across multiple industries… The disruption created by bits is a preview of what electrons are currently undergoing. Once increasingly massive amounts of excess energy are made available at near-zero marginal cost, entirely new business models and applications will emerge, alongside the electrification of everything.”

He draws a parallel to Netflix — inconceivable in the era of videotapes. “This is a step change being delivered.”

Asked what the world would look like if his industry worked as it should, Razzouk is unambiguous. “When — not if — we start deploying solar, wind and energy storage at scale, we’ll have cheap, bountiful and abundant energy to power everything from AI, Bitcoin, transport, cooling, and more. And if you zoom out… it means cleaner air and better health. Fossil fuels are the overwhelming cause of our climate crisis. When we have a system powered by renewable energy, we take the wind out of the sails of global warming.”

There is even the sense of a civilisational leap: “We would also be on our way to becoming a Type 1 civilisation on the Kardashev Scale… able to use all the energy sources available on its planet.”

Despite the scale of these ambitions, Razzouk remains grounded. “We’re a young fish making big waves.” The success, he insists, comes down to people. “We can aim high because we’ve got experience, strong partners and investors, and a superb team with market knowledge and the capability to deliver. I am proud of the team, and they say I could be louder about it.” 

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Redefining power and progress

To understand the magnitude of this transformation, Razzouk offers a thought experiment. “Each human being on the planet generates about 100 watts (w) of energy at rest every second, and that’s enough to fuel our metabolism. Then we discovered fire and how to harness farm animals for labour… Fast forward to today, the average Singaporean uses about 10,000 kilowatt hours (kwh) of electricity per year. That’s an increase of 100 times in power.”

The next leap is upon us: “We’re in the process of increasing the amount of energy at our disposal by 100 times again through the deployment of solar and battery storage and wind. We will then have an abundance of cheap, clean energy at our fingertips.”

For those who worry about intermittency, he clarifies: “When you plan a renewable energy system, you factor in that one week a year when there is no sun or no wind, for which your batteries have to be fully charged and last the whole week. What happens the rest of the year? You have 50 to 100 times the amount of energy you need at a marginal cost of almost zero at your disposal. This is something we should talk about a lot more because nobody’s thinking about all the business models that are going to open up when we reach that state of abundance.”

Despite the boldness of his vision, Razzouk does not claim infallibility — “Mistakes should stay with us. Unlearning can inadvertently lead to discarding useful skills and insights (along with any obsolete ones), thus weakening perspective and understanding” — but he does claim conviction, and the stubborn refusal to waste time.

That, perhaps, is the real mark of a vanguard: a leader who does not merely react to change but who drags it, kicking and screaming, into the present. For Assaad Razzouk, energy is not a distant technical debate. It is the engine of the future, and he means to see it running at full speed.

For more stories on The Peak Power List, visit here.