Katherine Valery has joined the judging panel for the Business Energy Achievement Awards 2026. Senior Sustainability Engineer at Jacobs Engineering, she works within the firm's sustainability department helping organisations enhance their environmental performance, optimise energy and water consumption, and achieve net zero carbon targets. Her role is both strategic and operational, encompassing sustainability plan assessment, carbon footprint reduction strategies, LEED certification management across design and construction phases, and ensuring compliance with applicable environmental regulations on new development projects.

Her professional background spans twenty years of sustainability and environmental engineering experience across Ireland and international markets. That global exposure has taken her across a diverse range of major capital projects, including upgraders, industrial complexes, pipelines, and terminal ships, with involvement in schemes valued at approximately $150 million. Across those projects, she has made critical design decisions to reduce fresh water consumption and maximise the recycling of wastewaters for industrial processes, delivering measurable environmental improvements within the demanding constraints of large-scale infrastructure development.

Her academic credentials underpin that applied expertise. Valery holds a Master's in Environmental Sciences and a Bachelor's in Chemistry, a foundation that gives her the scientific literacy to assess sustainability performance with precision and rigour. She is also a LEED Green Associate, reflecting her technical competence in internationally recognised sustainable building and design standards, and her ability to navigate the certification requirements that increasingly define best practice in sustainable construction and operations.

At Jacobs, her work centres on proposing practical, project-specific solutions that align with client sustainability expectations without compromising on performance or regulatory compliance. That client-facing dimension of her role sharpens her ability to evaluate the real-world viability of energy and sustainability strategies, distinguishing between approaches that are credible and scalable and those that fall short under operational scrutiny.

Her appointment brings a technically grounded, internationally experienced, and solution-oriented perspective to the judging panel for the Business Energy Achievement Awards 2026.

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