Zen Energy, the Australian “baseload renewables” gentailer led by economist and climate expert Ross Garnaut, says negotiations to sell the business are progressing well, with due diligence and strategic alignment discussions currently underway with a “preferred party.”
Zen last year appointed Matt Rennie from Rennie Advisory to find a buyer for the company and, over the weekend, the Australian Financial Review reported that Swiss energy trader, Gunvor Group, had been named by anonymous sources as the other party in “exclusive negotiations.”
In a statement to Renew Economy on Monday, Zen said it was unable to confirm or deny these reports, and could not name any of the multiple parties it has been in sales talks with, other than to say that they are all “strategically aligned” with Zen’s mission to build, generate and retail firmed renewables.
“All of the parties that we are talking to are deeply and strategically aligned with Zen’s purpose to create a major retail platform for the energy transition in Australia,” a spokesperson told Renew Economy.
The Adelaide-based energy storage specialist founded by Richard Turner started life in 2004, and is 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.
The JV’s plans to build a 100 MW solar farm and a 200 MW battery with between four to eight hours storage near Gympie in Queensland were last year waved through the federal government’s EPBC queue in less than a month.
Separately, Zen is also developing the $3.5 billion Western Sydney Pumped Hydro Project – proposed to deliver 1 gigawatt (GW) of energy generation capacity and up to 16 hours of storage – on WaterNSW land that once served the state’s coal industry.
As the AFR has reported, Zen Energy declared a $51.9 million loss in the 2023-2024 financial year, which deepened to a $133.6 million loss in the last financial year. Revenue remained steady over that time, at around $326 million, while finance costs rose from $17.2 million to $53 million.
“Australian government policy uncertainty, shifts in the global geopolitical landscape, the outcome of the US presidential election and a weakening global sentiment towards voluntary emissions reduction collectively created instability across environmental commodity markets,” Zen Energy said in its latest financial report.
“These conditions slowed investment in storage infrastructure and led to a sharp deterioration in the value of large generation certificates, with prices falling from approximately $50 per certificate between 2022 and 2024 to $17.50 by June 2025 and well below $10 by the end of calendar year 2025.”
Zen says the 2024-25 $133.6 million loss includes pre-tax, non-cash expenses of $129.6 million from unrealised net losses on derivative financial instruments and $23.6 million in pre-tax non-recurring finance costs from the early settlement of the Peak Energy facility after the divestment of the Templers battery energy storage system (BESS) into Zebre.
“Excluding these non-recurring and non-cash impacts, the underlying business would have been in a significantly better position,” a company spokesperson says.
