Coal man turned solar champion joins CEFC board

Australian energy industry veteran Tony Concannon will join the board of the Clean Energy Finance Corp for an initial period of five years, bringing three decades of generation and management experience to the government-backed renewables investment fund.

The appointment was announced on Wednesday by federal energy minister Chris Bowen and minister for finance Katy Gallagher, marking the first change to the line-up at the green bank by the Albanese Labor government.

Before Labor’s election win in May, former energy minister Angus Taylor made one last stamp on the CEFC board with the appointment in April of Matt Howell, the outgoing CEO of the Tomago aluminium smelter, and once a trenchant critic of renewable energy policies. Investment banker David Jones was also added to the mix.

The appointment of Concannon fills a vacancy left by the departure of long-serving board member Leeanne Bond, an engineer with experience in the water and energy sectors in Queensland and the Northern Territory.

From brown to shiny green

Concannon, the former boss of the now demolished Hazelwood coal plant in Victoria, is an interesting choice for the role, being one of a number of coal industry veterans who – as RenewEconomy once put it here – leapt the fence “from dirty brown to shiny green.”

In Concannon’s case, he went from a position heading up Hazelwood owner GDF Suez (now known as Engie) to become the founder and managing director of Reach Solar Energy, a start-up developing utility-scale grid-connected solar projects.

Making solar competitive with wind

Reach built the tech-forward 220MW Bungala Solar Farm in South Australia near Port Augusta, making it “battery storage ready” back in 2017 and designing it participate in Australia’s FCAS market.

At that time, Concannon told RE in an interview that he felt drawn to large-scale solar as something he could do on a start-up basis.

“The risk allocation was right. I couldn’t say that I had been totally green for the last 25 years, but I did have experience in bringing complex structured deals, and could figure out how to make solar competitive with wind, and how to do it without grants.”

These skills will all prove highly valuable at the CEFC.

Concannon is a chartered power engineer with international experience in governance, investor relations, operations management, finance and risk management.

He currently sits on the board of the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) and other previous roles include executive director of International Power and chairman of the Electricity Supply Association of Australia (now known as the Energy Council of Australia).

The CEFC provides debt and equity finance to clean energy projects in order to leverage private sector investment and recently exceeded lifetime investment commitments of $10 billion.

In a statement on Wednesday, Minister Gallagher said she looked forward to working with the newly refreshed CEFC board to support the Albanese government’s “agenda to reduce emissions.”

Nicola Wakefield Evans, Samantha Tough and Andrea Slattery were all three also reappointed to the CEFC board on Wednesday.