Battery producer and energy storage specialist Redflow has appointed executive chairman Simon Hackett as acting CEO after the resignation of Stuart Smith as CEO following his successful outsourcing of the entire battery manufacturing process to Flex.
Redflow also announced that board member Richard Aird has been appointed as acting Chief Operating Officer.
Redflow director Howard Stack said the company was grateful for Stuart Smith's leadership during the past four years. "Stuart has led Redflow during a period in which it transformed a promising technology into a world-class battery and outsourced manufacturing to Flex." Stack said.
"The company is now embarking on the next phase of its development, and with Stuart's departure we have appointed Simon and Richard as acting CEO and acting COO to oversee the delivery of ZCell batteries in Australia and to identify the leadership team to deliver Redflow batteries to the world."
{loadposition peter}Hackett, a major shareholder in Redflow, has more than 25 years of senior management experience as the founder of national broadband company Internode, which he sold in 2012, and former non-executive director of iiNet Limited (2012-13) and NBN Co (2013-16).
Richard Aird is a professional operations manager with more than 20 years of experience in commercial development and operations and was previously COO at Redflow from 2010-12.
According to Hackett, Redflow had received strong interest in ZCell, with more than 38,000 unique visitors to the Zcell website since it was launched at the end of March.
“To date, more than 1200 people from around Australia have directly expressed interest in buying ZCell-based energy systems. We have received enquiries from more than 380 installers interested in creating solutions based on the ZCell platform. We've already completed two training days with installers,” Hackett said.
"Because this is a new technology to the residential market, we are being intentionally selective in our initial installer engagement and training processes. Our aim is to ensure that initial deployments of ZCell solutions are delivered in a cooperative and successful manner.
“This is pivotal time for Redflow. We need to carefully manage our production ramp-up and product delivery rates to balance with our sales growth across multiple market segments. For a still relatively small company, we are alive to the need to maintain this important balance."