Founder & CEO
Founder & COO
Founder & Chief Strategy Officer
Chief Legal Officer & Company Secretary
Chief Commercial Officer
Chief People Officer
Chief Corporate and Government Affairs Officer
AAPowerLink Project Director
Project Director, Facilitating Assets
Chief Optimisation Engineer
Chief R&D Officer
Chief Development Officer
Chief Electrical Engineer
Chief Civil Engineer
Founder & CEO
David Griffin was noted as one of Australia’s top 100 Green Power Players by The Australian newspaper in 2022. Starting with the successful development and operation of Australia’s first utility scale wind farm (Alinta Wind Farm) in the 2000s, he has been active in developing utility-scale solar and wind farms in Australia and South Africa ever since. Through his own development companies, his chairmanship of Terrain Solar, and during his time as General Manager of Development at Infigen Energy, he has developed gigawatts of wind and solar farms. Whilst travelling across Australia, he was always struck by the abundant solar resource and suitable land that was available for renewable electricity generation. Whilst the combination of solar and land resources meant that Australia could comfortably meet it’s domestic renewable electricity demand, David was more focussed on how to serve the vastly larger and rapidly growing loads to Australia’s north. His analysis of high voltage direct current submarine cable technology at the start of 2018, concluded that this key enabling technology had evolved sufficiently to allow the first intercontinental transmission link to be developed. As a result, Sun Cable was founded with the initial objective of developing the Australia-Asia PowerLink, a first of a kind in terms of the scale of dispatchable renewable generation and intercontinental transmission.
Founder & COO
Mac Thompson is an experienced technology business founder and CEO. He founded and built DigiGuard, an Australian and New Zealand wide IT business continuity firm, headquartered in Melbourne, and sold it to Iron Mountain (NYSE:IRM).
He then founded, built and sold CloudRecover, Australia’s largest enterprise private cloud storage and online backup business, to J2Global (NASDAQ:JCOM).
Founder & Chief Strategy Officer
Fraser is the co-founder and CEO of AlphaBeta, an economic strategy firm, based in Singapore. He is a globally-recognised expert on sustainable development and energy transition issues, working with a range of governments, investors, and multilateral institutions.
His past work has included developing the Master Plan on ASEAN Connectivity 2025 (which included understanding how to accelerate the implementation of the ASEAN Power Grid), developing Indonesia’s national circular economy strategy, and working with Temasek on understanding investment and business opportunities related to sustainable energy transition in Asia. Fraser was a founding director and inaugural President of the Australian Chamber of Commerce in ASEAN (AustCham ASEAN), launched by Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull in Singapore in 2017, and a board member of the Australian Chamber of Commerce in Singapore. Fraser previously worked with McKinsey & Company for almost 9 years as a leader in their sustainability practice (with particular expertise on carbon abatement and resource productivity) and with the World Bank before that. He is a Rhodes Scholar, with a PhD in Economics from Oxford University.
Chief Legal Officer & Company Secretary
Angela is an internationally accomplished business executive and general counsel. Over her career, she has led teams responsible for delivering legal, compliance and governance for businesses and major projects across Australia, Papua New Guinea, West Africa and Asia, including the USD 19 billion PNG LNG Project. Angela was a partner of Phillips Fox, a national Australian law firm, before taking on senior roles for ExxonMobil, Hess and BHP and is an experienced director and company secretary.
Chief Commercial Officer
Mitesh has 26 years of experience in the energy industry with expertise in power business. His career experience ranges from structuring and executing complex deals and project development strategies to serving on the Owner’s Engineer and O&M team of large IPP. He is proficient in negotiating project agreements, and has been adviser to lenders, developers and investors for project finance and investment in green & brownfield power projects. His technology experience includes thermal and renewable power. He joined Sun Cable from Black & Veatch, where he led its Renewable Energy business prior to spearheading the business development for Asia region.
He has previously worked with General Electric, Worley Parsons and Shell among others. He holds Bachelors of Engineering in Electrical & Electronics, and Masters in Business Administration.
Chief People Officer
Linda joined Sun Cable from Boral Limited where she was the Group HR Director. An experienced human resources executive who has partnered with CEOs, executives and leaders, she has 20+ years experience in the people, culture and transformation space. Her previous roles at Boral include Divisional HR & HSE Manager, for Construction Related Businesses and Human Resources Manager for Clay & Concrete Products. Before joining Boral, she was at Pioneer International in HR roles covering Australia and Asia.
Linda holds a Master of Business Administration and a Bachelor of Arts with Honours majoring in Economics and Political Science from the University of NSW
Chief Corporate and Government Affairs Officer
Georgie is an Australian foreign policy, trade, investment and international government relations expert, and a Fulbright Scholar.
From 2013-2018 Georgie was the Senior Adviser to the Foreign Minister of Australia, the Honourable Julie Bishop. Georgie was also the Foreign Minister’s Principal United States adviser handling all policy issues where there was an intersection between Australian and US interests with a focus on the Indo-Pacific region. Georgie was the Director of Global Public Policy at Atlassian and is a Member of the Board of Advice for the University of Sydney Business School.
Chief Optimisation Engineer
Andrew has been a Photon Conversion Specialist for over 16 years. During his career, he has developed a renewable energy strategy for the Northern Territory, explored geothermal power, founded tech companies in the renewable energy sector and picked up qualifications to aid him along his journey.
Chief R&D Officer
Luke Marshall studied renewable energy and software engineering; he is currently a PhD Candidate at UNSW in renewable energy economics. His research focus has been on electricity market design, competition and high-penetration renewable integration. Early in his career, Luke co-founded Sunapse, which produced solar thermal modelling and optimisation tools. Luke was subsequently a project manager at 5B Australia, working on DC-side optimisation. Luke has also worked as a research and development engineer at Identitii, building blockchain-based smart contracts, compliance-related machine learning systems and energy trading tools. Luke is the co-founder of Oxamii, a smart energy retail and renewable integration company. At Sun Cable, Luke is a research and development engineer, with a focus on solar farm design, manufacturing and economic optimisation.
AAPowerLink Project Director
Andrew Barton is a project leader with 25 years in the energy industry and is a specialist in the planning and delivery of large scale, complex development projects. He has worked on and lead major onshore and offshore/marine projects across SE Asia, Middle East, West Africa, Europe, North America and Australia and spent 13 years living in Nigeria, USA and Qatar. Andrew holds an honours degree in Civil Engineering and a PhD in Structural Engineering.
Project Director, Facilitating Assets
Chris is a senior executive in engineering infrastructure development and execution, who has led and delivered complex major scale infrastructure projects and has extensive experience across energy & renewables, resources, rail transportation and advanced manufacturing.
He joins Sun Cable from BP Petrochemicals where he was the Director of Global Projects, leading appraisal, concept development and front-end engineering design of major capital investments for greenfield and brownfield projects. Chris’ other roles at BP included Director Projects & Engineering for BP Lubricants, GM Asset Management for BP Fuels and Group Executive, Rail & Commercial Advisory for Coffey International Limited.
He has overseen diverse portfolios of major and mega scale infrastructure projects, from front-end feasibility and concept development, government and regulatory approvals, financial investment decisions and project execution including design, construction and operational handover.
Chris has a Bachelor of Engineering (Honours) in Mechanical & Manufacturing Engineering and a Post-Graduate Diploma in Management.
Chief Development Officer
Mark Branson leads the development workstream at Sun Cable and is responsible for developing and de-risking projects from concept through to financial close.
Mark has over 15 years experience working upstream in wind, solar, hydropower, transmission and infrastructure projects as developer, advisor and consultant across all states of Australia, Asia Pacific and North America. He has worked with global energy, oil and gas and mining majors to secure land, approvals and social licence in extremely remote settings from the tropics to the Arctic across four continents.
Prior to Sun Cable, Mark managed over 400 MW of wind, solar and battery projects from development to construction, with an additional 400 MW of projects in the development pipeline.
Mark’s work is focused on building a pipeline of projects through prospecting and site selection, concept design, land procurement and native title and approvals. Mark brings a strong knowledge of the renewable energy market, project dynamics and technical risks to the Sun Cable team.
Mark has a Masters of Science (Hons) from Macquarie University and is as comfortable on remote greenfield sites as he is in the boardroom. Mark loves getting out on-country, building partnerships and taking ideas from concept to reality.
Chief Electrical Engineer
Peter Jones has over thirty years’ experience in the Design and Build, EPC, sector as a technical expert, design, procurement and implementation manager in a career progression that has taken him from Tradesman through to Project Director. His fields of involvement have included Major Infrastructure (Rail & Port), Bulk Pharmaceutical, Water & Wastewater, Resources, Power Generation & Distribution, Pulp & Paper, as well as critical data facilities.
His technical experience is based in EPC engineering with particular skills in Front End Engineering Design (FEED) and Project controls, Estimating & Cost Control and management of multi-disciplinary project teams related to process design, layouts, SMP & E&I design, equipment selection and procurement, tender documentation and execution readiness.
Chief Civil Engineer
Paul is an experienced senior executive and civil engineer with 30 years of infrastructure development experience. He is a remote area specialist having successfully delivered projects across Australia, including the Northern Territory and remote Aboriginal communities, PNG, the South Pacific, Africa and the Middle East.
At Sun Cable, Paul is responsible for visioning the transformation of the project’s concepts into physical infrastructure on the ground. This involves early feasibility studies for site selection to secure land tenure and obtain developmental approvals, through to design, construction and commissioning of the infrastructure. He also leads the delivery of site investigations, field trials, pilot projects and early pioneering works.
Paul’s experience spans the design and construction of infrastructure projects, management and maintenance of large and disbursed built infrastructure portfolios, delivery of major capital building programs, complex public sector procurement of major assets, vehicle and equipment fleet management, and leadership and management of operational deployments of people and equipment, including disaster and humanitarian assistance responses.
Paul has a Masters of Engineering (Project Management) and a Bachelor Civil Engineering (Hons).