Riccardo Lama elected next CENELEC President

Riccardo Lama was elected for a three-year mandate (2025-2027) during the CENELEC General Assembly, which was held in Belgrade, Serbia, on 22 June. His mandate as President-Elect is officially due to start on the 1st of January 2024. During this time, Mr Lama will work side by side with the current CENELEC President, Wolfgang Niedziella, and the whole CENELEC team, before the official handover in January 2025. This process is foreseen to ensure continuity in the transition, in a key moment for the evolution of the European Standardization System.

An electrical engineer by training, Mr Lama has more than 35 years of experience in the utilities sector. Through his work at Enel, Italy’s national entity for electricity and one of the European leaders in the sector, he has built an extensive and variegate expertise, covering both technical and managerial roles.

At the same time, Mr Lama has a long experience working in standardization. Since 2005 he has been active in TCs at the national level, and he has contributed to important work in many strategic sectors related to electrotechnology and energy distribution at the EU level, such as Ecodesign, Network Codes, Grid Connections and Green Hydrogen. Furthermore, since 2019 he has been serving as President General of CEI, guiding the organization through important transformations and a diversification of its business models.

The election of Mr Lama happens in a moment of transition for European Standardization, after the publication last year of a new Strategy by the European Commission gave it a new centrality in supporting the achievement of policy priorities. For this reason, in his electoral speech, Mr Lama committed to collaborating with the relevant partners at the European and international levels to maximise the ability of electrotechnical standardization to address existing challenges. 

Riccardo Lama commented: “In the current quest to achieve the twin digital and green transition, electrification is key: it is one of the most effective tools to build a carbon-neutral, efficient, and sustainable social and economic model for Europe. As the main organization responsible for standardization in the electrotechnical sector in Europe, CENELEC plays a central role in achieving these ambitions; as President of CENELEC, I will focus on leveraging the capacity of standards to support EU legislation towards this transition, in full complementarity with international standardization and the IEC”.