Professor Andrew Dyer
Interests: energy industry, company governance, commercial management, strategic planning, transparency, renewable energy, renewable energy, large scale transmission deployment, energy policies, energy advisor, utilities sector
Andrew is a Professorial Fellow at Monash University, where he assists with the University’s industry engagement programs. He is a member of the Monash University Industry Council of Advisors (MICA). Andrew also chairs/serves on several advisory boards including the Australian Regenerative Medicine Institute, the Monash Sustainable Development Institute, the Dean's Advisory Council (Monash Engineering) and the Faculty of Fine Arts and Music at the University of Melbourne. Andrew has been Chair of the Monash Energy Institute Advisory Council since 2017. He assists in a number of forums with strengthening the University’s engagement with industry.
Andrew holds a Bachelor of Engineering with first class honours from Monash University and an MBA from Georgetown University, Washington DC. “My father studied economics at Monash which helped with my choice of university. I was very good at Maths and Science, which lead me to engineering".
Andrew became involved in the energy sector in the late 1980s and has remained so ever since. Andrew’s professional career includes executive and operational roles in the utilities, telecommunications, information technology and professional services industries. “While at IBM, I worked with The State Electricity Commission of Victoria, where I learned the industry – from coal mining to customer billing. After working with IBM in Melbourne for about eight years, I decided to study again and was awarded a scholarship to attend Georgetown University. While at Georgetown, I worked part-time for Ernst and Young’s national utility practice, which was based in Washington DC. After Georgetown, I also worked for Florida Power & Light and then for a company called Indus International – which provided software to manage nuclear, other types of power plants as well as transmission and distribution”.
Andrew has considerable experience in government, government relations, and international trade. He has experience in the energy, technology, and professional services industries, in executive and operational roles based in Australia, Asia, the United States and Latin America. He continues to advise several organisations in the private and public sectors on strategic and operational matters.
Current and past governance roles include Non-executive Chairman and Director appointments at the Transport Accident Commission, Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman, Keystone Radiology, Zenexus, BidEnergy, BrightSource Energy, The Good Foundation, Grampians Water, Cancer Council Victoria and the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra. “Prior to my board career, I also was the Victorian Government Commissioner to the Americas, based in San Francisco, where I was heavily involved in bilateral trade and investment outcomes between the Americas and Australia. The problem-solving aspects of my education helped in all of my executive experiences”.
Andrew recently retired from the role of Australia’s Energy Infrastructure Commissioner, a role appointed by the Federal Government that reported to the Minister for Climate Change and Energy. As Commissioner, Andrew handled community concerns about wind farms, large-scale solar farms, energy storage facilities and the deployment of new, large scale transmission projects required to transform the energy sector. In this role, he also identified root causes of issues and complaints and worked with industry and government to adopt practices to remedy systemic issues.
It’s a very exciting time to be part of the energy sector because we are going towards this massive transition toward a low carbon economy. Our coal-fired power stations are ageing, and we need to replace that capacity in a sustainable way. The transition will be different depending on the location.
“I don’t think there will be any particular energy that will dominate. In Victoria, we have largely run the state on lignite, often referred to as brown coal, for 100 years. Today, and going forward, I see a much more distributed and diverse energy sources for electricity, from coal, gas, on-shore and off-shore wind, solar, hydro and pumped hydro, along with large scale battery storage facilities and, possibly, nuclear down the track. Also, our energy grid was designed around centralised coal resources - connecting renewables to the grid is different, complex and needs careful planning and investment”.