| POSITION | CHIEF FINANCIAL OFFICER |
| REPORTS TO | CEO |
| DATE | August 2023 |
| MORE INFORMATION | https://rowandigit.al/ |
| SEARCH CONTACT | Andy Lane – CFS Partners
M +1 414 807 4085 |
ROWAN DIGITAL INFRASTRUCTURE
Rowan Digital Infrastructure (https://rowandigit.al/) is a data center focused energy and infrastructure services firm owned and managed by Quinbrook Infrastructure Partners (www.quinbrook.com). Rowan is the operational business platform for the Rowan ‘green data center’ investment thematic devised by Quinbrook, a recognized global leader in the energy transition. Through a number of industry leading investments and initiatives, the firm is helping to directly support the parallel achievement of ESG impact and material progress towards net zero emissions targets across the US, UK and Australia. For its efforts over 2022, Quinbrook was recognized as Energy Investor of the Year for North America by Infrastructure Investor and Global Sponsor of the Year by Project Finance International.
Rowan develops next-generation data center campuses designed to deliver turn-key land and energy (‘powered land’) solutions to hyperscale and multi-tenant data center owner-operators. Rowan’s scope of services focuses on land acquisition, site development, utility interconnection and fiber planning, among others. The team at Rowan has significant experience with industrial site selection, hyperscale data center design and development, energy procurement and management, and dark fiber network construction. Rowan’s energy-first approach creates industry leading value propositions in speed to service and total cost of ownership for data center operators.
Rowan has identified and is actively developing multiple, strategically located sites across the US to host next-generation, mission critical, hyperscale data centers. Rowan aims to design and configure each site to deliver sustained and long-term competitive land and power cost advantages and assist hyperscale data center operators in meeting their acute need for incremental capacity, accelerating carbon reduction in their operations and progress towards their ‘net zero’ targets.
Quinbrook brings a unique combination of expertise from project site identification, wholesale power markets, fiber, renewable power project development and project financing, and importantly data center site selection in the US. Rowan seeks to identify and develop strategic sites for hosting new data centers focused on procuring low-cost renewable power with related competitive advantages in operational schedule, land cost, fiber access, water supply and back- up power resiliency. Rowan can also develop, construct and own, ‘build to suit’ facilities leased to data center operators under long term agreements.
Through various strategies, Rowan can offer below-market power supply rates to data center customers at certain Rowan sites combined with fully funded backup generation-as-a service options. Rowan can design and configure each site to deliver sustained and long-term competitive land and power access advantages, while providing renewable power supply solutions assisting data center operators to meet their sustainability and ‘net zero’ commitments. Rowan has assembled a substantial pipeline of sites in Tier 1 markets across the United States in various stages of development to host next-generation, mission critical, green data centers powered by renewables. Rowan’s first site at Temple in Texas is one of the largest multi-tenant data center campuses in the US with a hosting capacity up to 800MW.
“Demand for high-performance computing and data storage is expanding at an extraordinary pace, as is the need for those resources to be powered by renewable energy,” said David Scaysbrook, co-founder and managing partner of Quinbrook. “We are looking forward to combining our experience in renewable energy project development, construction and investment with Rowan’s specialist expertise in data center siting and structuring of low-cost power and utilities solutions, to address the acute demand for next generation, hyperscale data centers delivering a net zero carbon footprint.”
Added Scaysbrook, “As the scale of the energy and water consumption and resultant environmental impact of data centers expands, the provenance of their energy supplies and the carbon intensity of those supplies has become a critical requirement in site selection. Recent public announcements made by the hyperscale operators indicate commitments to using 100% renewable energy and to reducing their carbon footprint significantly by 2030 and beyond. Rowan is dedicated to the conviction that renewable power supply and site selection are now integrally related and completely symbiotic.”
ROWAN LEADERSHIP TEAM
CULTURE
Seeking ‘Best Practice’ Stewardship and ESG Risk Mitigation – Rowan’s core goal is inherently driven toward Net Zero Climate goals and building real asset investments that deliver enduring carbon emissions reduction. Our focus on sustainability, ethics and stewardship supports and extends well beyond this, to our broad stakeholder population and the many communities in which our businesses operate. We are conscious of our impacts on society at large, through job creation and preservation, greater community engagement, increased team diversity, promotion of a business culture supporting principled and ethical behavior and importantly, reduced environmental outcomes from our daily operations.
Environmental Stewardship, Jobs and Community Impact – Climate and emissions reduction are central to Rowan’s purpose, and to meeting the 2015 Paris Agreement commitments to “holding the increase in the global average temperature to below 2°C above pre-industrial levels”. Renewable energy also has a much broader responsibility to minimize environmental harm and we endeavor to support the environments in which our assets reside. Job creation, job displacement and retraining, community health and wellbeing, human rights and modern slavery are all central considerations in the growth of long-term infrastructure development. By building assets, Rowan is able to create new jobs, support areas that may have suffered job displacement and can drive better environmental justice, provide better affordability, security and reliability of energy and work with communities who are most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. Beyond our impact on our immediate communities, Rowan is focused on our supply chains, seeking to use our influence to cease modern slavery, a complex issue across many industries and regions today.
Human Rights policy, Supplier Code of Conduct, Modern Slavery Management Framework, Responsible Contractor Policy, and Corporate Social Responsibility Policy documentation available via – https://rowandigit.al/esg-and-impact/
ROWAN PROJECTS
Rowan has identified, secured, and is actively developing the priority sites described below:
MERIWETHER – Single Tenant Campus
OREGON
The Meriwether project in Forest Grove is located near the thriving “Silicon Forest,” one of the fastest growing data center markets in the United States and only a few miles from Hillsboro in Oregon, one of the world’s largest cloud and SaaS (software as a service) communities. Hillsboro is a significant tech hub with major companies requiring additional data center colocation space.
TEMPLE – Multi Tenant Campus
TEXAS
Rowan is building a new 800MW capacity data center campus in Bell County Texas, near
Temple. The campus will be built in two phases, with Phase 1 construction to be
complete by the summer of 2022, and fully operational in the second phase by 2024. Phase 1 is 225MW of IT load and offers multiple renewable power supply options.
MATTERHORN – Multi Tenant Campus
CALIFORNIA
Project ‘Matterhorn’ is within 80km of the San Francisco Bay metro data center market. Importantly, the site is located outside of PG&E/Santa Clara service territory which results in a substantial utility rate advantage that is a competitive cost advantage for all data center operators, given the significance of power costs to the total cost of operations. The Site offers multiple renewable power supply options.
SCHWAB – Data Center Project
OREGON
Project Schwab is strategically located within Prineville hyperscale availability zones. Rowan has been working with the local utilities to relieve that constraint and provide solutions which will offer more supply for future data center capacity expansion.
CINCO – Data Center Project
TEXAS
Project Cinco is a multi-phase site in the San Antonio, TX metro region with an ability to accommodate significant MW load capacity. The project also includes a Market Based Rate and potential for infrastructure hardening and back up generation. Located within major hyperscale availability zones, combined with renewable energy sources provides a great opportunity for savings.
Additional progress details available to qualified and interested parties.
Quinbrook was established in July 2015 by David Scaysbrook and Rory Quinlan (the “Founders”) who have invested in renewables for over two decades and in power infrastructure more broadly since the early 1990s. As fund managers, they have led investment teams and portfolio companies that have invested over USD 3 billion of equity in over 250 low carbon, renewable, storage and grid support projects covering a wide spectrum of technologies.
Quinbrook brings disciplined management of risk and return to each of the origination, development, and construction risk stages of infrastructure asset creation. The firm boasts a proven track record of successful business building, achieving significant platform scale in rapid time frames from earliest start-up phases. Examples include Scout Clean Energy (www.scoutcleanenergy.com) and Primergy Solar (www.primergysolar.com). Quinbrook targets markets and sectors where they see an early mover advantage and where scaled portfolios can be built efficiently by the Quinbrook investment team.
Quinbrook has a broad investment mandate to deliver ‘value-add’ investment returns from deploying innovative strategies in new infrastructure asset creation within defined thematics. This approach incorporates both ‘greenfield’ and ‘brownfield’ stage investing in project assets and the building of new vertically integrated businesses that take on defined strategies identified by Quinbrook’s investment team.
IN THE NEWS
October 2020 – Quinbrook Joint Venture to Power Renewable Data Centers in the US
February 2021 – Quinbrook’s Low Carbon Power Fund Awarded ESG Investment Fund of the Year by ESG Investing
October 2021 – Quinbrook, Birch Infrastructure’s 1.8GW data centre masterplan goes ahead with first $300m going into Texas hyperscale facility
October 2021 – Quinbrook’s Commitment to ESG Recognized by IJ Global 2021 ESG Awards
February 2022 – Quinbrook Hires Tech-Industry Renewables Veteran John Lucas to Lead Data Center Strategies
March 2022 – Green IT Is Having a Watershed Moment
April 2022 – Rowan Green Data granted zoning approval for 500MW campus in Temple, Texas
July 2022 – Quinbrook Launches $2.5 Billion ‘Supernode’ Data Storage Project in Brisbane
January 2023 – Quinbrook Expands Rowan Green Data Center Platform
March 2023 – Quinbrook Earns Trifecta of Awards For Excellence In Infrastructure Investing in 2022
Quinbrook Infrastructure Partners (“Quinbrook”), a specialist global investment manager focused exclusively on the infrastructure needed for the energy transition, today announced that 2022 was a capstone year for the firm. David Scaysbrook – “We are honored and grateful to Infrastructure Investor, IJGlobal, and Project Finance International for their recognitions –
- Project Finance International (PFI) Awards 2022 named Quinbrook Global Sponsor of the Year
- Infrastructure Investor Awards 2022 named the Gemini Solar + Storage Project North America’s Energy Deal of the Year
- IJGlobal Americas Awards 2022 named Gemini Solar + Storage Project the Renewable Energy Solar & Storage Deal of the Year for North America
April 2023 – Quinbrook Starts Construction of UK’s Largest Solar + Battery Storage Project
QUINBROOK LEADERSHIP TEAM
An industry seasoned leadership team based in Houston, New York, London and the Gold Coast with decades of experience and milestone transactions in independent power project development, construction and operations, M&A, energy and commodities trading, and asset management across both conventional technologies and a diverse array of renewable power, grid support and storage technologies.
CULTURE
Quinbrook is an entrepreneurial investor and innovator specializing in the value-add infrastructure segments underpinning the energy transition. Quinbrook aims to foster a culture, both within its own firm and within its managed portfolio companies, that exhibits respect for others, the assumption of personal responsibility, the deployment of initiative and the encouragement of creative thinking that stems from collaboration among a diverse team of professionals displaying the highest standards of ethical behavior. Valued behaviors incorporate the progressive earning of trust from others, self-awareness, humility, and constant vigilance around financial and operational risk. Thoughtful risk taking is both promoted and tolerated within well-reasoned investment strategies. Quinbrook is also a committed and focused ESG impact investor who believes that ESG credentials are best demonstrated by facts and measurable outcomes rather than marketing platitudes. The firm’s authentic conviction to ‘do good to the best of our collective abilities’ lays behind the many ESG related awards and peer recognitions Quinbrook has received to date.
ESG AWARDS
CHIEF FINANCIAL OFFICER
Reporting to the Chief Executive Officer @ Rowan, the CFO will proactively advocate for, create, and protect stakeholder equity value through the proficient management and supervision of all financial and risk management aspects of a high growth business. This will include either primary responsibility for or senior participation in financial control, financial reporting and optimization, risk management, project financing, strategic investments, corporate development, and overall executive leadership as a key member of the Rowan C Suite. The CFO will oversee the transition of the business from early stage development through site and facilities design/construction, project financing and into operations and help build a large scale portfolio of operational assets located across the US. The CFO will work in tandem with all members of the Rowan senior management team to foster a culture of professionalism, pro- active risk awareness and mitigation, personal accountability, respect for others and a passion for innovation and customer satisfaction. Rowan is in a high growth environment and must achieve operational cadence as a high-performing organization in order to execute on and deliver Rowan’s significant growth opportunities.
Financial Strategy & Management
– Build a ‘best in class’ financial control, oversight and governance function incorporating effective processes and procedures and prudent delegation of authorities.
- Leverage knowledge and relationships in the digital infrastructure markets to effectively support Rowan business development and project financings.
- Partner with the CEO to develop and implement short- and long-range financial objectives, plans, budgets and financial forecasts based on agreed goals and objectives.
- Continuously appraise the organization’s financial position and offer dynamic interpretation and forward-thinking scenario analysis.
- Measure, analyze, and help interpret financial information and make recommendations to the CEO and Board
- Preparation and issuance of timely and accurate financial statements and related filings
- Establish and maintain strong relationships with external service providers (banks, investors, auditors, legal, etc.)
- Oversee corporate income tax planning and compliance.
Corporate Development
- Support corporate development activities including identifying partnership opportunities, assisting in the opportunity assessment and due diligence process, and structuring transactions.
- Develop, evaluate, and analyze the financial impact of transactions including financing strategies, joint ventures, and acquisitions.
-Prepare plans for new initiatives, including industry and competitive analyses, and monitor and benchmark those launched.
-Participate and support CEO and Board in preparation and management of strategic business plans.
- Oversee the building of financial models for new investments and contribute to due diligence undertakings,
-Coordinate internal and external resources for M&A transactions.
Leadership
- A team-oriented senior executive with demonstrable credibility capable of consistently motivating the Rowan finance teams toward timely, actionable, purposeful tasks.
- Identify continuous improvement opportunities to enhance financial structures and processes ensuring sound internal controls and financial decision making.
- Build collaborative and integrated performance objectives and incentivize positive behaviors to achieve goals.
- Demonstrates dynamic, creative and entrepreneurial qualities
- Proactive self-starter with “roll up your sleeves” lead by example style with the ability to shift gears when necessary and work autonomously.
- Direct, insightful, and consultative presentations to internal and external audiences including employees, senior managers Board, investors, stakeholders, and customers where applicable.
- Help articulate strategies for bringing Rowan’ core strengths services capabilities to life through motivating and directing teams to higher performance.
- Resourceful and performance-driven, motivated to provide timely, identifiable, and measurable results.
KEY QUALIFYING CRITERIA
Precedent – Track record of strategic financial management leadership with an investment sponsor backed, entrepreneurial, high growth, progressive technology focused company.
Capital Markets – Extensive relationships across debt and equity providers familiar with broad and complex transactions across the digital infrastructure ecosystem.
Invested Environment – Ability to negotiate and support complex capital instruments, deliver on the Board’s requirements for performance forecasting and reporting, and succinctly articulate business case analysis to support decisions.
Event History – Demonstrated success preparing for and leading a similar sized digital infrastructure product and service solutions technology company through a valuation process, strategic acquisition, recapitalization, and/or IPO.
Financial Leadership – History of managing a comprehensive, full-function corporate financial organization to include accounting, reporting, strategic planning, and compliance.
Strategic Contributor – Earnest, courageous, and impactful executive disposition whereby their collaboration on the business model and performance results in positive corporate valuations.
Accountability – Embraces a highly visible role where daily opportunity identification, analysis, and execution of capital deployments positively affect value creation.
WHY CONSIDER THIS OPPORTUNITY WITH ROWAN?
Precedent – Rowan is the latest thematic strategy to be launched by Quinbrook following past successful ventures with Scout Clean Energy, Primergy Solar and Project Gemini.
Financial Strength – Rowan benefits from significant financial capacity to fund growth given Quinbrook’s commitment to creating a significant and scalable site portfolio in the US.
Impact – Rowan’s charter is growth and value creation from day one. The CFO will have a seat at the table with senior executives and visibility to QIP’s activities to witness how infrastructure investments ROI strategies work and how it’s applied to Rowan.
Progressive – Rowan’s unique business model and unique value proposition is a market maker. Rowan has the feeling of a startup under a powerful capital partner with precedent success in closely aligned and integrated sectors.
Creativity – Rowan offers the challenge and opportunity to sit at the leading edge of an intersection of multiple market sectors colliding requiring new approaches and definitions to achieve mutually beneficial solutions.
Culture – Rowan’s culture embodies both start-up entrepreneurialism and institutional knowledge and capabilities. Rowan is a mission-focused and collegial organization working in the construct of an ethical and purpose driven fund supporting a portfolio of companies.
COMPENSATION & BENEFITS
The compensation package will be determined relative to the credentials and experience of the final candidate selected by Quinbrook. The package is expected to include a competitive base salary, annual performance bonus compensation, longer term incentive compensation based on project development performance, and a comprehensive benefits program.
SEARCH PROCESS
Following a thorough exchange of information including increasing disclosures on Rowan, Quinbrook, project portfolio, resume, and Key Qualifying Criteria, CFS Partners anticipates recommending a short list of candidates in August 2023. Finalists will meet with select members of the Quinbrook & Rowan Senior Leadership Teams. The selected finalist will be presented with a compelling and competitive offer contingent on background check and positive references.