New Hydro CEO ready to roll up sleeves, tackle debt, energy generation

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This article was published 09/07/2024 (429 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Manitoba Hydro has hired a new chief executive officer to tackle the public utility’s high debtload and need for additional power, nearly five months after its leader was fired.

The new president and CEO comes to the job with “boots on the ground” experience and looks forward to tackling the many challenges faced by the province’s “Crown jewel.”

“The attractive piece to Manitoba Hydro is the challenges, the scope and the complexity,” said Allan Danroth, who starts Aug. 6.

“I’ve carved out a bit of a career for myself in taking on some very difficult assignments,” he said at a news conference Tuesday at Manitoba Hydro headquarters downtown.

Jay Grewal was let go Feb. 13 after helming the Crown corporation for five years.

Hydro is $24.6-billion in debt, faces rapidly increasing demand for clean energy as forecasts indicate new generating infrastructure needs to be brought on line as soon as 2029. At the same time, the board of the Crown corporation has a mandate to keep its assets publicly owned and its energy rates affordable for Manitobans.

“This is one of those things I can lend some expertise to and add some value,” said Danroth, who is currently vice-president of operations at Alberta-Pacific Forest Industries.

He has a master’s degree in business administration from Athabasca University, a first-class power engineering designation and a diploma in marketing and management sciences from the B.C. Institute of Technology.

“I’ve been in heavy industry, pulp and paper and power generation for a long time. I took over a pulp mill in New Brunswick. That mill had been shut down for 16 months, on four hours’ notice, and the previous employer had stolen the pension. I was 35 years old and had people working at that mill that had been there 35 years who had no pension,” Danroth recalled.

“That was a really big change, a complex problem that we had to work hard at to find solutions to.” (The St. Anne-Nackawic mill closed with a shortfall in the pension fund in 2004. In 2015, former mill CEO George Landegger pleaded guilty in a Manhattan courtroom to hiding $8.4 million in Swiss bank accounts.)

“My job as CEO is to provide stability — to let our talented executive team run their units and ensure our employees are empowered to do their jobs safely and to the best of their abilities,” said Danroth, a married father of two grown children.

“With my roots being on the shop floor, I also know that what people experience in the field may not be the same as how it looks in the head office.”

Danroth said he’s gleaned a range of experiences at private Capital Power Corp., running the Genesee thermal power station in Alberta and growing up in Prince Rupert, B.C., which has a large Indigenous population. He has industry experience involving Indigenous communities that will help him run Manitoba Hydro, which has a mandate to involve those communities in decision making.

He’s eyed working for Manitoba Hydro for a number of years, he said.

“When you look around the North American landscape, there’s not a lot of organizations left like Manitoba Hydro that are what I would call integrated in terms of power, gas and distribution. It’s got a tremendous geographical footprint… It’s a great undertaking — it’s the Crown jewel of Manitoba and I take that responsibility very seriously.”

He plans to make Winnipeg his home, become part of the “fabric of the community” and said his wife will join him after he starts.

Danroth has met with Premier Wab Kinew and Adrien Sala, the minister responsible for hydro, but said he couldn’t discuss plans to meet the challenges faced by the utility just yet.

“(Danroth) struck me as a very sincere and capable individual with great professional experience that will serve our province well,” Sala said in an interview Tuesday.

“He’s got real-world experience leading in industry and in energy. These are important fields and will serve him well in ensuring he can lead Hydro,” said Sala, who is also finance minister.

Hydro chairman Ben Graham said Danroth’s “boots on the ground experience” are part of what made him “an ideal candidate” and won him unanimous board approval after 780 applied for the job.

Grewal was sacked five months ago by the new Hydro board that was appointed by the NDP government in December, just after it took office.

Her departure followed a public disagreement with Sala over private-sector involvement in building new electricity generating infrastructure.

“Manitoba Hydro is at a very critical juncture, facing key decisions on how best to meet Manitoba’s energy needs in the future and we wanted a fresh perspective on how to guide the company in that direction,” Graham said Tuesday.

Tory critic Obby Khan accused the the NDP of hiring a new CEO “with no mandate to reduce Hydro’s $25-billion debt, no plan to deliver on a promised rate freeze, and no vision to meet the future energy needs of our growing province.”

As head of hydro, Danroth will have to navigate tricky, new territory, said University of Winnipeg political science Prof. Malcolm Bird.

“There’s a political dynamic here with Crown corporations in general, which are politicized corporate entities that have multiple demands from various groups being made on them at once and often in conflict with each other,” said Bird, who studies Crown corporations.

“Different parts of the government are putting different pressures on them, different parts of civil society, consumers, industrial users. There’s lots of competing political pressures on them and demands.”

The new CEO’s salary wasn’t disclosed. In 2022, Grewal earned $515,000.

carol.sanders@freepress.mb.ca