About

Active in Australia since 1996, ENGIE Australia (formerly GDF Suez Australia) is now responsible for the generation of approximately 2,000MW of energy via renewable, gas-fired and brown coal power plants. Its legal team is headed by general counsel and company secretary Lawrence Kim, who has been with the organisation since the start of 2010 and boasts an unparalleled knowledge of the company’s aims and objectives – and what is required to achieve these from a legal perspective. An extremely active deal profile is maintained by the company and supported by the legal department, with deals regularly being signed in order to ensure the operation of the sprawling power-generation empire. Examples of this include the August 2017 announcement that Engie Australia reached a deal with Australian-based Santos to provide gas to their 479-MW Pelican Point Power Station, and the partnership signed with GE, also in August 2017, to coordinate on the development of the 119MW Willogoleche wind farm in South Australia. The successful culmination of these agreements relies on the ENGIE Australia legal team’s strategic risk management skills, as well as expert organisation and due diligence work to ensure the safe progression of the project once signed. Perhaps the most high-profile project ENGIE have undertaken over the last year was the decommissioning of the Hazelwood coal-fired power station, announced in November 2016 and completed in March 2017. This project, completed in an unprecedented timescale given the complex nature of the task and the highly regulated nature of the industry, highlights the huge skill and professionalism at the heart of ENGIE’s operation. Kim explained that the ENGIE legal team has been very keen to maintain a high pace of innovation in their working techniques: ‘It is difficult to nominate a single innovation as being the most impressive; rather, success has built around a number of initiatives and the collective efforts of the legal team. For example, we have focussed on developing and strengthening the legal brand in our retail business, Simply Energy, and it is now considered a leader in value creation. This has included workshops with key business teams (such as sales and marketing), piloting software to track matters and focus on high value/impact work, using innovative matter management tools from enabling business to self-serve low value work, drafting new suite of template agreements to improve usability while reduce business risk, and rolling out new contract management tools to promote efficiency such as e-signatures’.