Calor Gas Northern Ireland has appointed Sytze Nijman as chief executive, succeeding Duncan Osborne; Nijman joins from SunSource, another SHV Energy company, where he served as chief operating officer.

Calor Gas Northern Ireland is the Northern Irish subsidiary of SHV Energy Holdings (UK), part of SHV Holdings NV, a Dutch privately held multinational specialising in LPG distribution and renewable energy solutions with over 28,000 employees and operations across more than 30 countries. 

In its most recently published accounts, Calor Gas Northern Ireland reported sales of £41.1 million and post-tax profit of £3.7 million, employing 125 staff. Nijman, 42, holds an MSc in business administration from the University of Groningen and brings several decades of experience across business transformation, growth and acquisition integrations in Europe, Brazil and India.

The structural driver for the CX agenda is the gap between what off-grid LPG customers experience and what they now expect from any energy supplier. Approximately 70% of Northern Ireland households are off the mains gas grid, relying on delivered fuel with scheduling, tank monitoring and billing interactions that have historically been manual, telephone-dependent and reactive. 

Nijman's appointment brief is explicit: investing in innovation, digital technologies and solutions that make it easier to do business with Calor. That framing directly addresses the CX deficiency of delivered energy, customers who manage their electricity, broadband and insurance digitally have no equivalent experience with their LPG supplier.

Calor Ireland's CIO Brian McDermott disclosed earlier this year that the company is expanding its AI stack beyond Microsoft Copilot to include Claude, n8n for automation and Lovable for rapid prototyping, a technology infrastructure investment that provides Nijman with the digital tooling to deliver on his CX brief from day one.

For the sector, the appointment of an SHV group transformation executive with an explicit digital CX mandate confirms that traditional energy distribution companies serving off-grid residential customers are treating the experience gap as a commercial priority, not just an operational efficiency exercise.

Source: irishnews.com / shv.nl / calorgas.ie / businesseye.co.uk