Business View Oceania | February 2020

55 56 BUSINESS VIEW OCEANIA FEBRUARY 2020 BUSINESS VIEW OCEANIA FEBRUARY 2020 YATES ELECTR I CAL SERV I CES (YES) operations, innovative projects, and insights into the future of the industry. The following is an edited transcript of our conversation. BVO: Can you give us the backstory on the founding and evolution of Yates Electrical Services? Yates: “I started the business in 2004 as a sole operator / electrician and I was provided an opportunity to work on some high voltage substations. Initially I was offered a two week contract that ended up turning into five years of work in the high voltage space, where I was fortunate enough to work with some senior members from the network business and managed to gain quite a lot of experience. This was our first entrance directly into high voltage, and I had the opportunity to bring a small team to a project being developed in regional South Australia. In 2011 we had the chance to tender the Oaklands Hill Wind Farm project in Victoria for developer Consolidated Power Projects, Yates: “We have multiple entities. YES Group is the construction arm of the business. YES Energy is currently holding a retail energy license in the National Electricity Market, so once we’re finished building a project through YES Group, YES Energy then takes over and retails the sale of electricity back into the national electricity market. We’re in a unique situation, as most electrical businesses only focus on the construction. We’ve taken it one step further where we build a project for a client - we do the design, the procurement, the construction and commissioning, and then facilitate the sale of the project’s energy back into the National Electricity Market through YES Energy. “We operate in all states in Australia, and currently have 50 employees that work between our home base in Renmark and another office in Kent Town in Adelaide. In the high voltage construction space, we work for a small handful of clients, including Siemens, Consolidated Power Projects, UGL and Downer. Generally their which enabled us to expand our team to 25 skilled tradespeople. “The business has been involved in the high voltage construction space now for about 14 years. I have travelled for 10 years building projects all around Australia and recently returned to my hometown of Renmark where the business was born - and where we are now focused on providing a full turnkey construction solution for solar farms between 200 kilowatts and 5 megawatts. Initially we thought building a small-scale solar farm would be a good idea to generate an annuity stream for the business, predominantly as a trial project. Yet, since the construction of our first site we’ve never been busier. To date we’ve constructed around 80 small-scale solar farms for a range of land- owners, companies and individual local and international investors.” BVO: Are there different divisions to the business? clients are superfunds or investment firms. In the sub-5 megawatt solar farm construction, we’re mainly working with high net-worth individuals or educated investors locally and internationally. The solar market is booming in Australia, and the capital cost to build solar farms is at a point where it makes really good economic sense. The uptake of solar into the National Electricity Market is phenomenal, with thousands of megawatts proposed to come online in the next few years.” BVO: How do you find and retain skilled tradespeople? Yates : “Being a regional area, getting skilled resources can be difficult, so we’re constantly bringing apprentices through the business and training them with some of the more senior guys to make sure we have a steady flow of new and upcoming skill-sets in the business. A lot of the training is done in-house but occasionally we do need to outsource.