The briefing
Energy: the scarcest asset in the buildout
AI demand arrived in quarters, while grids, transmission and turbines take most of a decade to build. That makes a connected, powered site the scarcest asset in the AI buildout. Jurisdictions with cheap solar, storage and fast approvals hold an advantage capital can't buy quickly, and Australia is one of them. Dr Andrew Mears, who founded SwitchDin and scaled it to Australia's leading distributed energy orchestration platform, looks at where electrons, compute and capital collide, and who captures the value.
About Andrew Mears
Dr Andrew Mears works on the layer of the AI stack that nobody can skip: energy.
Andrew is an electrical engineer with a PhD in biomedical engineering, turned serial founder. This includes founding SwitchDin which he scaled from a garage prototype to Australia's leading distributed energy orchestration platform, with more than 10,000 sites under control, and partnerships with most major Australian utility and energy retailers. SwitchDin's work with SA Power Networks used software to manage rooftop solar and batteries resulting in a tripling of South Australia's rooftop solar hosting capacity without a dollar spent on grid augmentation.
Today he helps companies take deep tech through to commercial scaling. He advises venture builders, corporates, project developers and investors engaged in the energy transition and other related first-of-a-kind projects.
Previously, Andrew was a Chief Technical Advisor for renewable energy and climate change for the United Nations in Southern Africa and South East Asia, and led country initiatives for the World Bank in the Pacific Region. His policy and strategic market initiatives mobilised more than $280M in energy and climate investment across 18 countries. He is a Visiting Fellow at ANU, mentors founders through CSIRO ON, Energy Lab and RMI's Third Derivative, and won the German Energy Agency's Startup Energy Transition Award.
His focus is where electrons, compute and capital collide, and who captures the value.