Zen Energy has appointed a new chair, after economist and climate expert Ross Garnaut officially resigned from the role in February.
Garnaut was filling in after Raymond Spencer resigned in August last year, and the company reported his exit in a corporate filing on April 29, The Australian reports.
Zen Energy chief Anthony Garnaut declined to comment on the change, saying the renewable energy generator and retailer may have an update in a few weeks.
The recently-appointed new chair is Mark Butcher, a former Ernst & Young managing partner and who counts five other current chair positions on his LinkedIn, including that of waste company Bingo Industries.
Other newcomers to the board include Pacific Blue chief Domenico Capomolla and Michael Larkin, who has a long track record as a corporate finance boss, following the departure of directors Raymond Spencer and Michael Lane, The Australian reports.
Zen Energy has been struggling with years of losses, after signing up to a series of projects with heavy upfront capital costs.
One of these is the $3.5 billion Western Sydney Pumped Hydro Project, which is proposed to deliver 1 gigawatt (GW) of energy generation capacity and up to 16 hours of storage.
Losses deepened from $51.9 million in the 2023-2024 financial year to a $133.6 million loss in the last financial year, due to one-off costs and as the prices of large-scale generation certificates plunged.
Revenue remained steady over that time, at around $326 million, but finance costs rose from $17.2 million to $53 million, according to reporting on last year’s financial data.
The company has also been taken to the NSW Supreme Court by a West Australian entity called Old Treasury, which is disputing whether a debt refinancing package changed the priority and rank of other shareholders, reports The Australian.
The company has been up for sale since last year, when it appointed Matt Rennie from Rennie Advisory to find a buyer.
In April, reports emerged that the company was in negotiations with a “preferred party”.
The Adelaide-based energy storage specialist founded by Richard Turner started life in 2004, and in 2015 was reborn as Zen Energy – Australia’s first integrated provider of “sustainable power generation, storage, delivery and retailing” – with Garnaut as chair.
By 2017, the company’s focus had shifted from providing household and community renewables solutions to rolling out a retail baseload renewable energy product targeting commercial and industrial users, backed by large-scale solar, wind and storage.
Zen has had a number of different partners in its quest, including at one time or another Santos and Sanjeev Gupta’s SIMEC group of companies. By 2020, however, Zen was forging ahead on its own, with Anthony Garnaut as CEO, signing major solar and wind off-take deals and buying up and developing its own big batteries.
In March 2025, Zen announced a deal with Taiwanese equity partner HD Renewable Energy Co (HDRE) to co-develop around 695 megawatts (MW) of multi-hour big batteries and 100 MW of solar across three Australian states.
As part of the deal, Taiwan-listed HDRE, then valued at more than $1.1 billion, signed up to spend $43 million on a 9.7 per cent stake in Zen, and co-develop and manage a 1.4 gigawatt (GW) solar and storage pipeline through a joint venture dubbed Zebre.
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