Speaker Profile

Andy Evans commenced his offshore wind journey in 2012 as a co-founder and CEO for the first 7 years of the Star of the South Wind Farm, Australia’s most developed offshore wind farm, and was responsible, with his co-founders, for introducing offshore wind into Australia. The Star of the South is the pre-eminent offshore wind farm in development in Australia and is now managed by co-investors, Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners, and in which Andy remains as a shareholder.

After stepping down from the Star of the South CEO role at the end of 2019, Andy established Oceanex Energy, with Peter Sgardelis and international investors, as the originator of the development of floating offshore wind farm projects off the coast of NSW, of which Norway’s largest company, Equinor, acquired a stake in the project entities in late 2022. Aside from progressing the NSW projects with Equinor, Andy is spending a great deal of time progressing the Bunbury Offshore Wind Farm in WA and helping progress the nascent New Zealand offshore wind market, where Oceanex has 3 projects in early development phase.

Andy is based in Melbourne and is also involved in other new clean energy ventures including NewVolt Infrastructure (which is the leader in introducing integrated generation and charging assets to progress the introduction of electric trucks into Australia) and Meta Renewables (which is being progressed with Peter Sgardelis and GHD Ventures and looking at onshore/off-grid assets to support brown and greenfield operating and manufacturing assets).

Aside from his energy development activities, Andy is releasing a feature-length documentary film ‘Planet Wind’, in 2024, which investigates the planetary force that is wind and the potential benefits it has in driving the energy transition and bring social and regional development change, mainly through offshore wind.