Zak is a Senior Partner and the Managing Partner of McKinsey’s Toronto office. He has nearly 20 years of experience serving a wide range of clients in the oil and gas, electric power, and natural gas sectors on operational, financial, strategic, and capital matters.
Zak has supported numerous high-profile projects, including:
- conducting a strategic and operational review of the electric business of a major integrated utility company, assessing potential strategic options, including sale or acquisition, and identifying value creation opportunities through operational improvements in generation, transmission, and distribution sectors
- supporting the creation of a renewable energy development group and supported cost reduction and delivery of a multi-gigawatt solar park portfolio for an American utility
- executing a rapid intervention and performance improvement of a multibillion-dollar investment portfolio for an American utility, including setting up a war room to coordinate activities across dozens of projects and improve performance
- collaborating with a major electricity company in a confidential M&A with significant implications for the company’s size and scale, including estimating potential operational and strategic synergies and developing a vision for the integrated company’s investment program
- collaborating with a leading utility company to develop its innovation strategy and operating model to expand beyond its core regulated business into unregulated activities, including developing a detailed vision of load and future profit impact, as well as identifying and evaluating multiple growth opportunities (e.g., electric vehicle charging infrastructure, distributed energy resources, microgrids).
- leading the operational transformation of an energy generation asset portfolio, including improving contractor management, work management, and productivity
- managing a total cost program for a major midstream sector company, addressing processes, operating model, investment projects, and operational improvements to achieve over $500 million in savings
- coordinating a gas company’s disaster response affecting 10,000 customers, working with field teams to replace equipment and restore customers, developing and managing data analysis to guide the response, and developing a strategy to engage with stakeholders
- analyzing cost and schedule projections for a hydrogen project portfolio, including detailed cost benchmarking and identifying cost reduction levers to support the final investment decision
- collaborating with an integrated Canadian utility to develop a perspective on the future of gas under different scenarios and understand the implications and strategic responses for their gas and electricity businesses, including the development of hydrogen, RNG, and renewables
- developing an investment plan to support the transition of a fossil energy generation asset portfolio to a net-zero emission portfolio for an integrated American utility, including renewables and carbon capture
- transforming the corporate costs of a utility, including creating a digital roadmap and a digital factory to deliver digital products to support new, more efficient ways of working by leveraging the latest digital and analytical technologies
- developing asset analysis models for multiple asset classes to improve asset planning by providing a better understanding of asset risks, reducing maintenance costs, and improving reliability for an electric utility
- developing a vegetation management analysis program using remote sensing, satellite imagery, and AI-based models to improve vegetation management based on risk and growth, reducing costs by up to 15 percent and improving reliability by 5 percent for a utility
- analyzing a confidential M&A for a top-tier utility, with significant implications for the utility’s size and scale, including estimating potential operational and strategic synergies and developing a vision for the integrated utility’s investment program
- reviewing the investment program of a major integrated utility to improve capital productivity by enhancing capital investment planning, reviewing design specifications and standards, improving execution, and reducing costs through better procurement
- developing and implementing a new capital investment planning process for a leading utility, providing greater transparency on the investment budget for transmission and distribution investments, enabling refocused capital spending, and increasing risk mitigation for the same expenditure
- developing an infrastructure investment strategy for greenfield sites for a leading institutional investor, including identifying market opportunities, the right approach for making investments (e.g., through partners, as a minority financial sponsor), when in the development cycle to make investments (e.g., preapproval, construction), and how to structure the organization most effectively to launch the investment and deploy $3 billion in capital