In your role at BCG, what are the big questions that keep you up at night right now?

I focus primarily on the Australian gas industry, and also lead the Transformation practice for BCG in Australia. Right now, one of the big questions on my mind is how we can better leverage tools like GenAI to manage the complexity of the energy transition and the next wave of business transformation. 

What are the most exciting opportunities for the energy sector that could emerge before 2030?

I would love to see gas recognized as part of the Capacity Investment Scheme (CIS) or through an alternate support model – how we get enough firming into the system to enable renewables to get the coal out is one of our most pressing societal questions.  Getting new capacity in plays an incredibly important role in enabling the transition away from coal, and I think change in this space is desperately needed to help the system pick up pace on renewables penetration.

I’m also watching the Beetaloo and some other new exploration in offshore Victoria with interest – the drilling results are super promising, and it has the potential to help both our domestic supply shortfalls, and in the case of the Beetaloo, also supporting our regional trading partners through LNG.

Finally – I’d be remiss to not mention the current global trade environment – I think this actually presents a major opportunity for Australian projects across both upstream and power, on availability and on pricing.

With a NEM market review underway, what do you see as the most pressing areas to change?

I’d love to see some progress on Distributed Renewable Energy Zones (DREZ) as a way to accelerate decarbonisation using the infrastructure we already have, and enabling smarter investments in any future network build, and I think that is very possible with the tools we have today and a bit of policy change – I think the National Electricity Market (NEM) review can be a great enabler for that.

What innovations do you believe will have the most impact on the energy transition?

There’s a lot of untapped potential in Long Duration Energy Storage (LDES) – it’s been slower than I would have liked, but it still has a lot of potential to be part of the long-term solutions.

I also think that the use of analytics and large data models will change the game in so many aspects of the industry – in what we build, where; in how we build it; in how we contract it; and in how we run it to its full potential. There are some great recent use cases in schedule optimisation, in digital twins for design, and in predictive maintenance – I think we are only scratching the surface.

What’s the one thing in the energy sector that no one is talking about, but should be?

I don’t think we spend nearly enough time on partnerships and collaboration – within industry, and also between industry and government. The reality is that Australia is a small-scale nation with smaller scale companies when you put us in a global context; and the projects that we need to build across the full value chain are at a scale we have never done before. Succeeding a reasonable cost requires a new level of creativity – in supply chains, in infrastructure sharing and reuse, in how developers and contractors partner – we need to spend more time on the topics that will help us say ‘how can we get to the best outcome, the fastest, at the least cost’ and challenge more of the historical assumptions and models.

Join us at Australian Energy Week 17-20 June 2025 to hear more from BCG and a host of other energy leaders. Learn more.