Adjunct Professor Anthony Marxsen OAM
Tony Marxsen came from his hometown of Cobram in 1964 to study at Monash with support from the State Electricity Commission of Victoria. Four years later, he graduated with First Class Honours in Electrical Engineering. He went on to graduate in 1976 with a PhD, again from Monash. He spent thirty years at the SECV in a diversity of leadership roles in power grid engineering and information technology. He led a huge project to move the whole SECV online before departing in 1993 from the role of Chief Engineer Power Grid Development.
Tony moved into corporate technology executive roles. Boards around the world were rushing into hi-tech adventures. Tony worked to promote realistic technology investment and was able to deliver cost-savings from simplification of IT infrastructure at ICI Australia, and customer satisfaction gains from innovative and secure web-based automation at Victoria’s Transport Accident Commission.
In 2003, Tony joined the Nous Group. For seven years, he led a diversity of government and industry strategy consulting projects, including some in the energy sector and grid engineering. In 2007, he accepted the Victorian Government’s invitation to join the Board of the Victorian Energy Networks Corporation.
Like many Victorians, Tony was shocked by the 2009 Black Saturday tragedy. He was invited to join the secretariat of the government’s Powerline Bushfire Safety Taskforce to lead its arc-ignition research. He subsequently led several ground-breaking research projects to build a reliable evidence- base for powerline fire-safety engineering, now used globally. His work led to Victoria’s just-completed program to radically re-engineer its rural powerline networks to cut fire risk.
Overlapping this work, Tony was appointed to the Board of the Australian Energy Market Operator. In 2015, he was appointed Chairman for two unexpectedly turbulent years: CEO Matt Zema died suddenly; South Australia had a state-wide blackout; electricity prices spiked as Hazelwood shut down; and a summer load-shedding event hit two states.
A year prior, Tony had accepted an invitation to Chair IND Technology Pty Ltd, a Melbourne startup now exporting ground-breaking technology that detects and locates powerline defects long before they start fires. He continues to guide this now-substantial business through the challenges of exponential export growth as other countries pursue the fire-safety benefits of its technology.
In 2018, Tony returned to Monash as Adjunct Professor in Electrical and Computer Systems Engineering and Chair of the Monash Grid Innovation Hub. The GIH links university researchers with industry and funding bodies. It sponsors research projects that address key challenges in Australia’s move to a low-Carbon future. Hub projects are making a real difference to power grid engineering and energy market design, both here and globally.
Tony remains an active leader of the Monash Grid Innovation Hub and IND Technology, working at the leading edge of Australia’s technological response to climate change.