The Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA) has announced the launch of its global $100 million ‘Solar ScaleUp Challenge’, inviting innovators, developers, engineers, financiers and solar customers worldwide to accelerate innovation in large-scale solar projects and help drive down costs.
The aim of the Challenge is to stimulate greater collaboration and breakthroughs in the solar sector, particularly around installation, operations and maintenance.
This supports ARENA’s vision of achieving ultra-low-cost solar (ULCS) to reduce electricity costs and enable decarbonisation of hard-to-abate sectors like industry and transport.
“Ultra-low-cost solar is critical for reducing electricity costs and decarbonising hard-to-abate sectors such as industry and transport. It is also a key factor in Australia becoming a renewable energy superpower,” said ARENA CEO Darren Miller.
“Collaboration in solar is key to reducing costs and maintaining Australia’s leading role in solar technology development and innovation.”
ARENA is delivering the Challenge in partnership with Greenhouse Tech, whose online platform facilitates the formation of multi-disciplinary teams and global collaboration.
Greenhouse Tech has successfully run similar challenges to the NetZero Steel Challenge.
“We are keenly aware of the barriers preventing our ULCS vision from becoming reality, so we want to try something different to crack open the opportunity,” Miller explained.
“Teaming up with Greenhouse Tech allows us to bring in more expertise to achieve the objectives of this Challenge.”
The Challenge aims to bring together stakeholders across the solar project lifecycle to find innovative solutions and quickly scale them.
As Mark Rowland, Chief Collaboration Officer at Greenhouse noted, “Bringing together all the different stakeholders involved in solar projects is key to solving these problems innovatively.”
While huge cost reductions have already been achieved in solar PV, ARENA believes more breakthroughs are needed.
The agency is targeting an installed cost of just 30 cents per watt and a levelised cost of electricity below $20/MWh by 2030 to help unlock 1 terawatt of total installed solar capacity by 2050.
“There is now an opportunity to further reduce costs so that we can drive greater adoption of solar PV and unlock significant scale,” said Miller.
The Solar ScaleUp Challenge complements ARENA’s separate $1 billion Solar Sunshot program focused on growing domestic solar PV manufacturing and commercialising Australian innovation.
The global Challenge is open for submissions over the next eight weeks.
Those with ideas for reducing large-scale solar installation or operations/maintenance costs are encouraged to participate by visiting the Solar ScaleUp Challenge website.
