For Beca’s new Energy Market Director Benjamin White, Australia’s renewable energy future hinges not just on policy, technology or investment – but on getting everyone to row in the same direction.
While Australia’s energy transition is often framed as a technical or economic puzzle, Benjamin White believes its greatest challenge is one of coordination.
“The challenge ahead is too big for any one player,” White says.
“We need government, investors, developers, advisors, communities and consumers all contributing to a coordinated and well-orchestrated energy future.”
A career built on perspective
White steps into the Beca role with a rare blend of experience – spanning public sector policy and strategy, global corporate renewables, utilities, and large-scale investment.
Based in Melbourne, he is one of three senior market directors brought on to drive Beca’s continued expansion across energy, water and defence in Australia.
His focus is strategic market growth, industry engagement, new service development and accelerating the firm’s energy footprint – particularly in transmission, generation and storage and deepening key adjacent services like planning, environmental, business case and project management.
It’s a job that resonates personally, as White explains.
“Energy is a deep passion of mine,” he says.
“I’ve spent more than a decade in the sector. Playing a senior role in the energy transition in Australia motivates me enormously.”
White brings a nuanced understanding of the system’s inner workings – having led project development, worked inside government, and most recently served as Senior Director at Norwegian global energy supermajor Equinor.
“Government has a central role to play – policy, regulatory frameworks, investment certainty,” he says.
“But I also understand what a project needs to succeed commercially and socially. You need a route to market, a sustainable and secure rate of return, and a business case that stacks up over the long term. We want our utilities and private sector to be doing well – because a strong, profitable energy sector ultimately serves the end customer.”
Ambition, capability and partnership
White’s new employer, Beca, has made no secret of its energy sector ambitions.
Building on established transmission and broader power engineering credentials, the firm is scaling up fast in renewable generation and storage development services. It offers clients an integrated value chain of complementary services like environmental planning and approvals, project and asset management.
White sees this dual capability as central to delivering not just technical solutions, but in establishing even deeper partnerships.
“When you bring design, engineering and complementary additional services to the table, clients value it, I know I certainly did spending most of my career on the owner and developer side” he says.
“Providing an end-to-end service allows for more efficiency, rigour and helps clients hold up to regulatory and commercial scrutiny.”
White believes this holistic view – and Beca’s culture of care and agility as a true partner – is what sets the company apart.
“It’s ambitious but never loses sight of quality,” he says.
“We want to partner well, not just with clients but also with other service providers. This isn’t a short-term play – Australia needs authentic and long-term partnerships.
“We are a purpose driven organisation, ‘make every day better’, this really means something for our people.
“Helping to solve Australia’s biggest energy and transition challenges is something that inspires us to come to work every day.”
If that sounds like the language of someone who’s been on all sides of the table, that’s because he has.
White was an executive in the Victorian Government, deeply involved in creating and leading Victoria’s renewable energy strategy and first reverse auction scheme for large scale onshore renewables and storage capacity. He’s worked closely with the Commonwealth, other states, private sector and market regulatory bodies. He later served as Chief Development Officer for the nationally significant high-voltage direct-current (HVDC) interconnector Marinus Link – a role that gave him a front-row seat to the complexities of developing large-scale transmission builds.
“Every major transmission project has hit some kind of bottleneck,” he says.
“These are largely greenfield developments – not even most transmission businesses let alone governments have built at this scale for over 40 years. It’s new territory in the energy sector in many ways.”
While some see this as a constraint, White sees opportunity for firms like Beca, and for Australia more broadly.
“We need backbone infrastructure to guide us – superhighways for our energy generation and storage assets to connect and to support our major industries and communities. It’s been said before and still holds true that there’s no transition without transmission,” he says.
It’s not just infrastructure, but investment ecosystems, that need tuning. White is vocal about the importance of creating investment certainty, supply chain activation and regulatory streamlining.
“We need policy and investment signals that allow industries to grow and capital to flow. If supply chains know there’s a pipeline of projects that are bankable, we get local content and workforce uplift, we get projects reaching Final Investment Decision (FID), that in turn lower costs as things scale, leading to greater energy supply and grid security,” he says.
“But that requires planning systems to be enablers – not blockers – while still maintaining environmental stewardship, consumer benefits and incorporating First Nations wisdom.”
White is encouraged by progress, pointing to Victoria’s new transmission plan, the outcome of the recent Productivity Roundtable to move at pace by enacting faster and simpler project approvals, and the recent final investment decision for Marinus Link’s first stage.
However, White warns the sector cannot afford to be too risk averse or polarised.
“If we can cross the Rubicon to genuine coordination and collaboration with a shared end goal of a cleaner, fairer and more prosperous energy future, we’ll be well on our way to victory. Right now, we’re all still somewhat getting in our own way at the river bank,” he says.
Lessons from abroad
That view is shaped not only by a love of history but by international perspective. White brings insights from the energy transitions in Europe, the US and APAC.
“No one’s doing the transition perfectly,” he says.
“But the UK is probably the closest model to our own east coast system in Australia – retiring coal, building renewables, some gas, greater interconnection and using offshore wind as a new baseload. We might not see offshore wind here at the same scale or pace, but the lesson is in sequencing: get the order right, get the settings right and have national level buy-in.”
Asked when Australia should seriously consider scaling offshore wind, White is cautious but hopeful.
“These are huge infrastructure undertakings – technically complex and capital-intensive. They only work if there is pathway to profitability,” he says.
“We’ve seen promising segments like green hydrogen fade due to commercial and pricing hurdles. Offshore wind may follow a similar trajectory. That’s not to say they are off the table. There is room and a role for all in the energy transition. But the low-hanging fruit for now is still onshore wind, solar, batteries and transmission. That’s where Beca is focused.”
White also sees new frontiers opening – particularly data centres.
“They’re emerging as critical infrastructure, sitting at the nexus of energy, water and defence. If done strategically, they can be part of the solution – dynamic assets that can play a significant role in the market and respond flexibly to market signals, like smelters and batteries.”
Culture and the talent challenge
The energy transition is not just a technical or policy challenge – it’s a workforce challenge. For White, culture is everything.
“We look for people with talent, yes – and also the right attitude. We value an enterprising spirit. People who want to solve problems and work alongside clients for the long haul,” he says.
“The opportunity the talent challenge unlocks for an organisation like Beca, is we have fabulous bench strength and depth that allows us not only to leverage our people in Australia but also draw on our integrated technical talent from the entire international business. Beca does that well.”
Environmental planners and impact assessors are especially in demand, and White knows the field well – his academic background is in natural resource management and land planning.
“They’re like gold in this industry. If we don’t have enough of them, we can’t move projects forward in a way that respects both communities and ecosystems,” he says.
White says purpose and people keep him going when the transition path gets rough.
“You’ve got to ask yourself – what’s your deeper purpose? For me, it’s my two daughters. I want to be able to say I played a part in creating a future that’s cleaner, safer and more prosperous,” he says.
He points out that it helps to be surrounded by people with the same drive and outlook.
“When you work with others who are competent and passionate, and you can sit across from clients knowing you’re all aligned – that’s what keeps you energised. And in equal measure you’ve got to be tenacious and caring. You’ve got to love problem-solving and doing business,’ he says.
With that mindset, and the national energy market at a pivotal juncture, White sees this moment not as a crisis, but as an invitation.
“In Australia, we’re not short on natural advantages,” he says.
“We need competitive tension of course, that is vital, but perhaps more than ever at this point in time we need greater cooperation, courage and commitment to unlock Australia’s prosperity and productivity – so what are we waiting for?
“Let’s get this done.”