Mike Cannon-Brookes reveals takeover plans for AGL
If Mike Cannon-Brookes wins control of AGL, the tech billionaire plans to shut all its coal-fired power stations within eight years and have just 600 workers running a purely renewable energy operation.
NSW
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Atlassian co-founder Mike Cannon-Brookes is vowing to create up to 12,000 new jobs by dramatically accelerating AGL’s switch to renewables but only 600 positions will be permanent — sobering news for the 1800 full-time workers at the energy giant’s coal-fired power plants in NSW and Victoria.
AGL’s board on Monday rejected the $7.50 a share takeover offer from the software billionaire and his bid partner, Canadian investment giant Brookfield.
However, Mr Cannon-Brookes told The Daily Telegraph he was undeterred.
The consortium fronted by Mr Cannon-Brookes wants to shut all of AGL’s coal-fired generators by 2030 — which he said was 15 years earlier than the company’s current timeline — and replace them with storage-backed wind and solar farms.
Mr Cannon-Brookes said his “aspiration” was to give every coal-fired power plant worker the chance to stay on with a green AGL.
“We would certainly endeavour to do that,” he said.
The consortium planned to create up to 12,000 jobs to build the new renewables projects, he said, many of which would be in the same spots as AGL’s existing power stations to take advantage of their connections to the broader energy system.
“Historically the grid has been built around those thermal assets — there are many wires and transmissions coming in and out of them,” Mr Cannon-Brookes said.
“That creates a huge opportunity to build renewables and other generation assets (plus storage) in those very same locations which should hopefully give some comfort to those people.”
However, a “fact sheet” provided after the interview revealed just 600 roles would be ongoing after construction.
The consortium claimed that a total of about 1000 people worked at AGL’s coal-fired plants at Bayswater in NSW and Loy Yang A in Victoria.
However, AGL said there were about 1800 full-time employees at those two stations.
Mr Cannon-Brookes said the takeover plan would be “one of the biggest decarbonisation projects on earth — if not the biggest”, switching out seven gigawatts of coal-fired generation with 8GW of green power.
The transition would increase stability and reduce prices, he said.
“We would be building a lot of cheap, reliable energy in the form of renewables that have a higher reliability than the current ageing thermal generators that we have, some of which are almost as old as the Moon mission and … are going offline quite a lot,” Mr Cannon-Brookes said.
Federal Energy and Emissions Reduction Minister Angus Taylor was not available to be interviewed, but in a statement sounded a warning.
“Driving out dispatchable capacity is a significant risk to electricity consumers — both in terms of reliability of the grid and electricity price impacts,” Mr Taylor said.
Mr Cannon-Brookes said his bid was “good news” for manufacturers.
“Don’t forget, most of those businesses have goals to decarbonise their own business. So for a lot of those customers, this is a very good news story,” he said.
“They are going to have concerns about reliability. We are going to have to talk to them about that. Which we will do. They are going to have concerns about price, as any customer will in any business. We’ll talk to them about that and show them why this is a good plan for them.”
Mr Cannon-Brookes said the AGL board’s rejection of the bid was “disappointing” but “we continue to push on” making the case to investors.
AGL chairman Peter Botten said in a statement that the company’s plan to split itself in two — a retailing business with clean energy and a separate coal-fired generation company — was better for investors.
AGL’s shares closed up 76 cents or more than 10 per cent $7.92.
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