Awards

It was a great honour to be selected as the Energy Professional of the Year at the WA Energy Awards on Tuesday night. It was particularly humbling to be recognised amongst a distinguished crowd of leading local energy players, and I congratulate all my peers who continue to pursue fantastic work in what is an exciting time for the energy sector. What is becoming increasingly obvious to me is the collaborative atmosphere that we have created in WA. The fact that as a collective, our trials, market mechanisms, start-ups, legal frameworks, and regulatory approaches are gaining prominence on the national, and indeed global stage, is testament to our incredible ethos and approach to innovation in this State.

It must be said that as CEO of Horizon Power, receiving such an award is more a reflection of the continued contribution and great work being done across all aspects of the business I lead. We have been on a journey at Horizon Power, and it is incredibly satisfying to start to see the benefits of the years of hard work each and every person has put in.

Being a small, vertically-integrated utility supplying customers in the remotest corners of Western Australia, we are seeing the energy sector change more acutely and more immediately than most, given the isolation of our grids, low customer density, high uptake of rooftop solar PV, and the higher cost of supply for our networks. Over the past five years, Horizon Power has managed to reduce operating costs by over $100 million per annum (almost 20 per cent of the total cost base), and simultaneously re-align our strategy to position the business as a global leader in distributed renewable energy microgrids. We are carefully, and deliberately, reinvesting in our people, our systems and our processes to create a home for microgrids.

At Horizon Power, we recognise that distributed energy resources (DER) microgrids are our future, and with the rapidly falling costs of solar PV and battery storage systems, coupled with advances in control and software systems, we are presented with a significant opportunity to offer customers a cheaper, cleaner, more attractive solution than the traditional poles and wires model. We are seeing this play out with our award-winning PowerAhead pricing plans, which, in a novel move away from traditional electricity supply models, provides customers significant control over their electricity bill, with greater transparency, enabling technologies, and additional incentives to help customers manage their usage more efficiently. We also continue to receive extremely positive feedback on the stand-alone power systems that we have installed across the State, and we are committed to developing these systems as a key product and service offering of the business, along with a suite of behind the meter consumer products.

Whilst we have only taken the initial steps of what will no doubt be a long and challenging journey, Horizon Power is now on track to embrace the sector’s disruptive challenges and has re-aligned to a new customer-centric business model, unlocking the benefits that DER microgrids and associated technologies can provide. Being a vertically-integrated utility provides Horizon Power with the unique advantage of having flexibility across the supply chain. My vision for Horizon Power going forward is to capitalise on the innovations and developments in new and emerging energy technologies (i.e. the seamless integration of solar PV combined with residential battery storage, advanced meters, and intelligent control systems) to build renewable energy microgrids that can accommodate significantly more renewables and be more resilient.

At Horizon Power, we are now on a pathway to reduce the cost of our operating systems, facilitate improvements in system efficiency, deliver resilient networks, improve reliability and security of supply, and improve power quality across all of our isolated and islanded electricity systems. I thank everyone – from our Minister, our Chairman and Board, executive, employees, vendors, industry peers, policy makers, right through to our valued customers - for their support and continued encouragement of our endeavours in this regard.