Brookfield Asset Management has signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with wind turbine manufacturer Envision Group to explore localising renewable power and decarbonisation manufacturing supply chains in Australia to facilitate and accelerate the country’s energy transition.
The MoU with Envision follows a similar exploratory agreement with Reliance Industries in early August with both aiming to facilitate the domestic manufacturing of renewable energy components. Currently, the equipment required in Australia is imported.
Under the MoU, Brookfield and Envision will explore direct capital investment and the contribution of skills, knowledge and expertise to the Australian renewable energy industry, with a view to setting up facilities that can produce or assemble Australian made equipment needed for local renewable developments. Locally manufactured equipment could include wind turbines, towers and blades as well as assembly lines for grid-scale or electric vehicle batteries and hydrogen electrolysers.
The MoU with Envision is one of the key initiatives being undertaken by Brookfield to bring global manufacturing technology and expertise to Australia.
In March this year, Brookfield along with EIG signed a binding agreement to acquire Origin Energy. The proposed acquisition is currently going through the relevant approvals processes.
As part of its proposed acquisition of Origin’s Energy Markets division, Brookfield along with its institutional partners and global institutional investors GIC and Temasek has set out a plan to invest between A$20 billion and A$30 billion over the next 10 years to accelerate its energy transition.
Brookfield head of renewable power and transition business in Australia Luke Edwards said: “Amid the global transition to net zero, we want to make sure domestic renewables developers including Origin’s Energy Markets business are in the best position possible when it comes to securing the components we need to build critical infrastructure that reduces our emissions.
“The scale of the task ahead and the amount of equipment required in Australia justifies having best-in-class large-scale domestic manufacturing.
“We believe creating resilient and local supply chains for critical decarbonisation equipment will help accelerate and derisk Australia’s energy transition.”
Independent analysis undertaken for Brookfield has found creating a manufacturing hub in Australia for clean energy equipment may create approximately 18,000 direct and indirect jobs. Many of these would exist in the regions most impacted by the transition such as the Hunter Valley in New South Wales and the La Trobe Valley in Victoria.
Brookfield is uniquely placed to support these manufacturing initiatives given its track record in committing long-term capital to enable the energy transition, and its innovative approach to large scale investments in re-shoring of essential and strategic manufacturing processes and supply chains such as its investment in the US$30 billion Intel Chip plant in Arizona.
