THE PROFILE: Merrily Hunter is the new president of the Energy Efficiency Council (EEC). A mother of two, Merrily is also the founder, chief executive officer and driving force of MAC Trade Services, which is expanding out of South Australia to deliver the tradesperson skills needed for the energy transition.
In May, her company won the inaugural Inclusion Champion’s Award at the EEC’s annual conference gala awards night in Sydney.
Hunter’s story reveals her business evolution and philosophy in this first of an interview series with Murray Hogarth.
Murray Hogarth: It would be good to get a sense from you about your life and your work life balance and who you are?
MERRILLY HUNTER: I’d always been really passionate about work, and even when I was little, I always wanted to be in business. I would dress-up in my mum’s work clothes and have glasses and a briefcase, pretending to have meetings and I was always focused on business. At that time, I used to be really into real estate, and used to stash real estate magazines under my bed and try to understand everything from data metrics to rental rates and return on investment.
So by the time I turned 15, I had already left home and left school, not because of conflict at home or anything like that. I was just very fiercely independent and wanted to get started on my career working a job and studying at night. We have a really tight, close knit family, but never had a lot of money.
I’d watched my dad trying to run his own small businesses working nights and weekends trying to make it work, and it never really took off. So I swore I would never run my own business.
That’s not exactly how things have panned out?
It wasn’t an ambition of mine to run my own show,. But I knew I wanted to do something in the business realm. I was just going to do it through a corporate career. So I had my very first job at eight, which was newspaper runs. At 15, when I left school, I had a job that same day, and was working during the day to help with bills and at night I studied at TAFE finishing my high school, and then my business diplomas.
At 19, I found my first start in the energy space working for mining equipment companies which opened my eyes to how big the energy sector was.
[Next came work for Ergon Energy in Brisbane, later acquired by AGL Energy, and a move to Melbourne with AGL and the “green team]
I found my calling there. Everything just made sense, and it was such a new language and a new world. I realised that that has become one of my skills, taking technical speak and translating it into terms for the right audience to receive it, whether that’s industry or trades or residents.
[Around this time came Victoria’s energy efficiency target, with just one other person in the business who understood the scheme.]
At first, it was just me processing towers of paperwork because everything was done manually back then. It was also around this time that I started hearing a lot of the stories coming in from the tradies about what worked or didn’t work in the field. It was the first time I’d been engaging with the tradies to train them on what they needed to do to comply.
Social equity came into the frame as well…
I also had my mind opened to the real energy poverty that people experience every single day.I remember being told a story from one of our field teams that [in South Australia] they had visited a home of an elderly man that had a single lightbulb that he was moving from room to room in order to save energy and money.
It’s been 15 years, and I still remember hearing that story and how it moved me. So South Australia really became a lot of my focus because I love the fact that their scheme focused on social equity, and it really focused on energy efficiency for everybody, renters included. What I loved about these programs is because they were funded through a levy on the energy bills, they were community funded, the community benefited from them, and the community was employed through them as well as helping the environment and network load. It’s a great policy in action.
What was the segue from AGL to doing what you’d said you wouldn’t do, running a small business of your own?
I’d built this little bubble within AGL, and I was dealing with all the tradies, and I was doing energy efficiency, and anybody who was coming through the company, I would sit and do a 101 with them, explaining how all the (energy and carbon) schemes work together. So, when the team was restructured around 2014 and I was offered a redundancy or a restructured role that put me in an area I really wasn’t interested in, I took the redundancy not knowing what I would do next. I was pretty burnt out. I was at home licking my wounds when one of the tradies that I had been working with over the years from South Australia called up and said, “The schemes are really changing over here, coming into the new year, come and train my team.”
So one door closed and another was prised open …
Within the same week, Origin Energy approached me as well and said, “Come and build for us – what you built for them.” At the time I wasn’t prepared to go back to a corporate job, but I didn’t want to let them down, so I set up a little consulting gig, MAC Consulting, which was my initials
Then the ACT government called and asked if I would help them in shaping their policy and teaching them how to field audit. [Other work came along, followed by an expanded team to manage the load].
It was around this time that I thought, I’m repeating the same subjects and topics in these classroom sessions all the time. Why don’t we build our own online training platform and actually show people what a good job looks like? And that spurred the birth of EEIQ, a training platform for tradies which won an award in 2018 for the best innovation in energy efficiency.
How did bigger business growth opportunities present themselves?
[First came the opportunity to buy a business in SA] I pulled together every bit of savings we had and sold our house. Then moved to Adelaide, bought the company, and rebranded as MAC Trade services.
It wasn’t a year later that Zen Energy approached us and said, “Do you want to buy our engineering and hardware division? And again, it just made sense. We were already covering the full domestic electrification services. We were doing carbon offsets and electrification services for a variety of retailers by that point, and doing all of our own carbon trades. It made sense to then own the C&I (commercial and industrial) side of things and start doing the big battery builds, big solar farms and have engineering under our own roof.
How did you manage the fast momentum?
When that Zen deal came through, I was very pregnant at the time, so literally everything was growing. It was a lot to take on but I wasn’t alone, the MAC team was amazing, they shared the load and we all grew together.
Now what we’re finding is that being a generator, an aggregator and a trader in the carbon emissions sector, we’re doing more than a million (energy/carbon saving) certificates a year now, and where the demand has cropped up for us is that the energy retailers who are coming to us are saying, we need a trades partner that represents what we value and our brand; we want somebody who’s going to do a great job, who’s not going to put in products and chase rebates with low-end products that then create a waste-based issue, and we need somebody that is an ethical company.
How did you manage the staffing parts of the growth?
MAC ticks all of those boxes. We’d gone into this with a focus on governance and quality, doing things the right way the first time. The people who have joined our team over the years have shared these values and similar to myself many have stepped away from high pressure corporate careers, to join the team and make a difference. They are just as passionate as I am in wanting to have an impact on our environment and energy transition. For what we’re able to achieve, we’re actually quite a lean team, with only about 45 of us.
How did you marshall the bigger resources you needed?
I think we’re well over 400 tradies in the network now. What we’ve found is that a lot of really good tradies have avoided working in subsidy schemes because of their view on the kind of trade that subsidy schemes attract. So, when they partner with MAC, they know that we are supportive of their existing model, the range of products they are proud of installing and connecting the dots to offer subsidies to compliment what they are already doing. Not high-volume, low-cost channels. Part of the partnership is that they agree to our standards of delivery, sit our training programs, are regularly audited and agree to adhere to our safety standards. This allows us to have a consistent customer experience and delivery of high quality workmanship in the field with trade networks across SA, New South Wales and Victoria.
How does your business model addresses the green skills gap and cope with things like the variation in literacy and language?
Being able to use our own visual learning and training platform means that we can recruit people and bring them in under our banner, and we’re able to push energy efficiency schemes further than what they’ve otherwise been able to achieve so that more people can participate.
It circumnavigates issues like literacy and language barriers, which we’ve found can be a common barrier for uptake of new policy and programs in the trade sector. With EEIQ, they’re able to watch what a good job looks like, rather than having to sit in a classroom and do a written exam. And our plan is to continue pushing all the way up the east coast to be 30-40 per cent of the trade services environment, so that every time you talk to a MAC tradesperson, you’re able to talk about green tech, energy efficiency and green finance through ethical lenders.
And that’s really part of the value proposition there, that you’re able to have this “one-stop electrification shop” that can walk you through everything in your home or everything in the built environment.
MAC Trade Services has just won the new Inclusion Champion’s Award from the Energy Efficiency Council. You’ve told me that you don’t believe in just having diversity quotas.
I think that quotas are important for companies that haven’t organically created an inclusion culture within them, because otherwise they’re never going to create change. But what I personally felt about MAC is that by establishing quotas, it actually took away from the people who won that job on merit. I didn’t want to create that divide, and nor did I want anyone on our team to feel that another gender was treated differently. Everybody here has something to bring to the table, and the diversity of our team has actually really been our strength.
The fact that we have people from all backgrounds, from a diverse gender set, and diverse work and lived experience, means that we get fresh sets of eyes on what would commonly be an echo chamber of experience from the energy sector.
We’ve now got people who’ve come in from hospitality, from legal, from finance, and there’s a lot of transferable skills and knowledge in those spaces that will only serve to excel the business and streamline operations.
Our diverse model has helped us to be more innovative and creative in our solutions. We have achieved gender equality mainly by using online testing tools during recruitment. When profiling new recruits we test their character and work ethic, things such as how supportive they are of others, honesty levels, collaboration and communication skills, this testing elevates the importance of “soft skills”, as opposed to relying purely on an interview performance and references.
The energy trade services area has traditionally been seen as the complete opposite of diverse. Is there a broader dimension for diversity, in the field, with tradespeople?
Oh, definitely. I’m actually quite disappointed that we haven’t attracted more female tradies to our network. And I’ve been thinking about this for a bit, and also talking with the team about how we can encourage the next generation of female tradies to come through. It’s got a lot to do with being introduced and exposed to trades sector skills in secondary schooling. I think that the environment that we’re in today, with AI replacing a lot of jobs, it’s a more pertinent time than any to be in front of the next generation of students to suggest pursuing a trades role becoming an electrician or plumber. These are roles where there is only growing demand.
But it doesn’t overcome the key issue that a lot of women face in their working career, that if you’re going into the trade space, you need to ensure that the trades company you’re working with will have flexible working conditions for the changes in circumstances you will have in your own life. I would say at least half of the MAC team, both men and women, have carer responsibilities for children or parents. When you are caring for another, particularly young children, you need to have flexible working conditions.
And when you’re talking about a small trades company, many of them, just can’t offer that service due to the cost involved and time demands. So I do think that for greater gender inclusion in the trades sector, the environment needs to change.
In order to encourage more female trades who are going to create this as their lifelong career and stay in the industry, there needs to be greater support for those smaller trades companies to give financial or structural support, to be able to provide flexible working and shift-based working. If we can do that, then I think we will see a lot of change in that space.
What’s your leadership style?
MAC has always put that family juggle front and centre, obviously with my own experience as well. I didn’t feel like my set of circumstances and flexible options should be different from my team. What I realised was that, what I needed as a new mum (and not having any family support locally) my team was going to need that too.
So we put in place 16-week paid maternity leave, and for the supporting partners on our team offered eight weeks paid leave to support their partners and grow their families. They can also access flexible return to work options, job sharing arrangements, unlimited sick leave, quarterly well being leave, all of which is just so important to have a balanced working life.
How does inclusivity and flexibility work when the business is small?
We’ve attracted a lot of incredibly talented people who otherwise would be drawn to shift-based work or lower skilled work than what their actual qualifications commanded. One of our team members was actually a fully qualified solar installer in Canada, when he migrated over to Australia, those licences weren’t recognised here, but nor could he afford to go and be on an apprenticeship to earn it again, he had to be primary carer for his kids. It was perfect for what we needed him for; we needed to be able to provide technical troubleshooting and advice over the phone to our field teams, and he had all that knowledge, but he couldn’t be on the tools because of the caring arrangements in his life.
But you might be talking with somebody who’s a lawyer by profession, and somebody who has spent years learning their trade, who wants to work but has caring commitments, they just need the opportunity for flexible working to be able to use their skills within the times that they’ve got available.
You’ve been on the board of the Energy Efficiency Council (EEC) for five years or so, became vice president, and suddenly you are coming in as president. Is motherhood and a growing business not enough?
Ha! Well, I am passionate about this space and the more I can share my knowledge the more I feel it will grow. With the EEC, I’ve been involved as an active member for well over a decade, and they do incredible work progressing the sector. The fact that they’re able to bring in voices from all around the world to collaborate, build frameworks, committees, working papers to progress energy efficiency in Australia, my role with the team, has never really felt like work.
The industry has changed a lot over the last five years, it’s been a pleasure serving on their board since 2019. I’ll admit, it’s been a juggle with kids and the EEC and also the company growing at an eye watering pace, but I wouldn’t have it any other way.
It’s been possible because of the team that I have at MAC and the support of the EEC team. (Merrily is succeeding Energetics CEO Dr Mary Stewart, another powerhouse woman in the energy management sector, saying “I hope that I can do it well, because, gosh, Mary’s done an incredible job. She’s a bit of a legend in this space.”)
I’ve got a complete imposter syndrome going on here taking over from Mary but I also can see that energy efficiency is shifting in its usual audience and attracting a cohort of new people who are interested in grassroots movements, and getting trades involved asking “How do I get involved? How do I talk to my local trades person?” and these are areas where I think I can share my lived experience and bring a new perspective to the role.
What are the great opportunities you see for the energy transition and what are the risks?
I’m normally an optimist, and in most things that I look at, I’m an optimistic person, but I do fear that we are in an environment today, particularly going towards an election where people don’t trust facts.
While renewables and electrification make sense on every front, investment, trade, economics, social equity and not just from a sustainability perspective. Unfortunately, there is a lot of noise around saying it’s not the right path for the energy transition. I say “noise” because very few of the statements opposing the renewables transition can be backed up by data.
Now, this noise hasn’t stopped private industry from progressing renewables in the past but it does make it harder.
Obviously, we faced the same kind of environment back in 2009, when I was working on the CPRS program, or the “carbon tax” as many people know it now, and in hindsight, a lot of people looking back at that time say, “Australia would be so much further ahead if we’d actually just implemented it then.”
But when you have a cohort of the media that’s actively working against those policies and is funded by fossil fuel industries, it’s hard to get everybody on the same page. It doesn’t take much to muddy the waters, particularly when people are doing it tough. There is so much opportunity for Australia to align with its strengths, progressing renewables and even exporting it. Then to transition our built environment to work within the supply and constraint periods of the market, it’s an exciting time to be part of the sector and see all the new tech being developed.
Do we need a stronger energy transition narrative for people?
I don’t think we’ve done a good job of taking people on the journey to understand the energy transition, what it is and how they and our environment will benefit from the change. We haven’t invested enough time in energy awareness and consumer behaviour. What is the impact if you are electrifying a home? How does that translate to emissions? So many people are saying,
“Well, hang on, if I’m getting off gas, then I’m using more electricity. What does that mean? How does that actually help the situation?” So we could definitely benefit from a good comms strategy! That’s the negative side of it. On the positive side, there is so much opportunity in this space from employment, tech and household benefits. Having an electrified home means that you can go completely to renewables and storage. Having a dynamic home that can work with the supply and demand of the grid at different times, and being engaged as a user, means that you’re empowered. I think that there’s a huge room for domestic energy in the transition, not just for new builds, but retrofitting existing housing stock and commercial building stock.
While there’s a lot of work that still needs to be done for renters and people who don’t have the asset rights, whether they’re in public housing or they’re in share-housing and apartment living. There is also a huge opportunity to transition those built environments as well.
There needs to be more work done on how you can get the subsidies to a point that it makes sense for a renter to make an investment in an asset that they may not necessarily own, but they get the energy benefits from.
And the other opportunity that is slowly getting more and more traction, is industrial decarbonisation. That is an area that really ”moves the dial”, with the emissions reporting requirements for scope emissions, a renewed focus on direct action as opposed to offsets, and with the European Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism,putting carbon tariffs on imports that are coming into European markets, or Australian exports in our case. There has never been a better opportunity or a better environment for large-scale emitters and industrial operations to go on their own sustainability journey.
Your last words to wrap this up?
There’s a lot of room to be optimistic about the future of the energy transition in Australia.
There’s a lot of things we could do better, but we’re on the right path.
As for things I’d like to fix as a priority? Getting better alignment between all of the states is one. Each state is facing the same issues, being constraints as we’re transitioning to renewables, voltage and frequency load control concerns, and EVs coming on. Another “no brainer” is having a smart meter in every household.
There are still states that have less than half of their households with smart meters. If we’re going to move to a renewable-led economy and renewables-led grid, that’s a critical step. In order to empower users, you need to know what time of day you’re using energy and being incentivised for using it at a time when we have surplus power. So you need the right tools for the right job, and smart meters is where you start. I’d also like to see the setting of energy performance standards on rentals and property so that renters and owners can make informed decisions.
This will be a key transition for the future and also the emergence of virtual power plants or “battery feed in tariffs becoming the next booming market. There is so much happening in this space that it’s an exciting time to be part of the energy transition, and I feel lucky to be playing a part.
More key takeaways
The theme-setting quotable quote: MAC has always put that family juggle front and centre, obviously with my own experience as well. I didn’t feel like my set of circumstances should be different from my team. So what I realised was that what I needed as a new mum, and not having any family support around, my team were going to need that too.
Natural-born businessperson: I always wanted to be in business. As a child, I would dress-up in my mum’s work clothes and have glasses and a briefcase, pretending to go to meetings, and I had my first paying job at eight years old delivering newspapers.
Comprehending carbon circa 2009: We would wheel out one of our carbon specialists from the (AGL) regulation team to explain the upcoming Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme (CPRS) and lose engagement with the customer because it was high level, with so much technical jargon, that the customer didn’t know how it actually impacted them. I asked my boss at the time, could I take a secondment to the “Green Team”, saying, “I’ll learn it all, and I’ll come back, and then I’ll be able to communicate the right way to our customers so that they understand what’s involved for them.”
The punt pays off: We’re doing more than a million (energy/carbon saving) certificates a year now, and where the demand has cropped up for us is that the energy retailers who are coming to us are saying, we need a trades partner that represents what we value and our brand.
Strong ambition to keep growing: Our plan is to continue pushing all the way up the east coast to be 30-40 per cent of the trade services environment, so that every time you talk to a MAC tradesperson, you’re able to talk about green tech, energy efficiency and be connected with green finance with ethical lenders. And that’s really part of the value proposition there, that you’re able to have this “one-stop electrification shop” that can walk you through every energy consuming appliance in your home or business with great quality trades and products with a subsidised rate due to the carbon offsets.
Gender diversity on the tools is still a key challenge: I’m actually quite disappointed that we haven’t attracted more female tradies. And I’ve been thinking about this for a bit, and also talking with the team about how we can encourage the next generation of female tradies to come through. It’s got a lot to do with engagement during secondary schooling and flexible working practices.
Flexibility in the workplace pays off: We’ve attracted a lot of incredibly talented people who otherwise would be drawn to shift-based work or lower-skilled work than what their actual qualifications commanded because of the flexibility offered in those roles.
A big industry role too (new President of the Energy Efficiency Council): Don’t worry, I’ve got a complete imposter syndrome going on here, but I also can see that energy efficiency is attracting a cohort of new people to the sector and more engagement from the trades industry. This is where I have specialised during my career, the human centred implementation barriers and execution, and where I feel I can add my experience and skills to the role. There are also a lot of community sustainability projects that are saying, “How do I get involved? How do I talk to my local trades person about electrification?”
The energy transition is facing serious headwinds: We haven’t taken people on the journey. We haven’t invested enough time in energy awareness and behaviour. What is the impact if you are electrifying a home? How does that translate to emissions? So many people are saying, “Well, hang on, by getting off gas, I’m using more electricity. Won’t that be worse for the environment? How does that actually help the situation?” And I don’t think that we do enough in that space to effectively communicate with residents and build support for electrification initiatives. So that’s the negative side of it. On the positive side of it, there is so much opportunity for improvement and innovation in this space.
There’s a scary historical precedent: We face the same kind of environment as back in 2009, when I was working on the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme (CPRS), or the “carbon tax” as many people know it now, and in hindsight, a lot of people in our sector look back at that time and say, “We’d be so much further ahead if we’d actually just implemented it at the time.” But when you have a cohort of the media that’s actively working against those policies and is heavily funded by fossil fuel advocates, it’s hard to get everybody on the same page.
Nonetheless we’re headed in the right direction: There’s a lot of room to be optimistic about the future of the energy transition in Australia. There’s a lot of things we could do better, but we’re on the right path.