Mike Renna, the impactful CEO of South Jersey Industries who help lead a transformation of the company during a most challenging period of the sector, will retire effective Aug. 3, BINJE has learned.
Renna will be succeeded by Donald “Blue” Jenkins, a 30-year industry veteran who joins SJI from AltaGas Ltd., where he was Executive Vice President of AltaGas and President, Utilities of the Company and President of AtlaGas’s natural gas subsidiary, Washington Gas.
For Renna, the transition will end a 12-year run atop the Folsom-based energy company and closes out nearly three decades with SJI overall. But even though the transition has been in the works since 2024, Renna made clear in an interview with BINJE that there will be no victory lap between now and then – no coast to the finish line.
There’s a board strategic retreat in mid-July. There’s a successor to hand off cleanly. And there’s a job he still intends to show up and do.
“I’m going to keep doing my job right up until that time,” Renna said. “I’m always going to do what’s in the best interest of SJI, and I’m certainly not going to leave my successor with an unaddressed problem.”
Read more on Mike Renna:
- Renna to retire as SJI’s CEO, capping a nearly 30-year run in South Jersey energy sector
- Retiring SJI CEO Renna: N.J. needs to get moving on nuclear, now
- Renna’s exit interview: Outgoing CEO of SJI on where the sector stands
The incoming CEO will take over the same day Renna steps down.
It has been a heck of a run for Renna.
He joined SJI in 1998 and spent his first 15 years on the company’s non-utility side before being named president and chief operating officer in 2014. He was elected to SJI’s board of directors that same year and became president and CEO in 2015.
One of Renna’s first moves in the top job was a strategic pivot that has come to define his tenure: downsizing and divesting much of SJI’s non-regulated businesses to concentrate capital on modernizing its gas utility infrastructure.
The shift was significant. SJI’s earnings mix went from nearly even between regulated and non-regulated businesses to roughly 90 percent utility today, Renna said — a transformation he tied to replacing aging pipe infrastructure and, later, to SJI’s acquisition of Elizabethtown Gas, which brought North and South Jersey utility operations under one company for the first time.
The Elizabethtown acquisition, Renna said, was about more than adding customers. It meant blending two utilities that had operated independently for decades, each with its own culture and systems, into a single approach. “We took the best of both, and kind of harmonized our processes and our approach and our systems,” he said.
SJI also built out a renewable natural gas platform under Renna’s watch that he said now ranks among the largest in the country, drawing on a diversified feedstock that includes food waste and manure from roughly 20 dairies. The company is developing the Linden Renewable Energy Project, which SJI has said will be the largest RNG facility in North America once operational.
As for the future, Renna said he has no plans to disappear from New Jersey public life once he steps down.
He will have to resign from SJI-affiliated board seats — including the Federal Reserve Bank board and the N.J. Business & Industry Association board — upon retirement, but he plans to remain chair of the board of trustees at the Hun School of Princeton, where he has one year left in that role, and to stay on the University of Delaware’s advisory council to the school’s president.
He also plans to spend part of the fall coaching offensive and defensive line for Hun School’s football program, where both of his sons played.
“If I volunteer somewhere, I’d love to volunteer, and in a sport that gave so much to me,” he said.
What he won’t be doing, Renna said, is treating the next several weeks as a send-off.
“There’s not going to be any Michael Jordan farewell tour,” Renna said. “I’m going to work right up until Aug. 3.”
