Australian innovation helped launch China solar juggernaut – now it’s time to hitch a ride with PV giants

The CEO of UNSW-originated solar innovator, SunDrive, says collaboration with China will be crucial to the success of Australian companies seeking to make it in the booming global solar industry, as well as to federal government plans to establish a local solar supply chain.

SunDrive on Monday announced it has signed a new joint development agreement with two giants of the China solar industry – Maxwell Technologies and Vistar Equipment Technology – to co-develop and distribute commercial-scale direct-copper plating tools, to produce high-efficiency heterojunction (HJT) solar cells.

The new JDA adds to a deal SunDrive struck last year with fellow China giant Trina Solar, to jointly apply for a share in federal Labor’s Solar Sunshot funding to help set up a module manufacturing plant in Western Sydney, with an initial production capacity of 1.2 gigawatts (GW).

SunDrive CEO Natalie Malligan said on Monday that these deals are part of the company’s strategy to focus on its strengths at home – innovation and R&D – while partnering with the leaders in manufacturing at scale, in China.

Since its inception in a suburban garage, SunDrive has set a couple of world records in solar cell efficiency, won an Arena grant, and successfully demonstrated that more than 99 per cent of the solar cells produced at its pilot facility in Sydney can meet and beat commercial standards.

The company is now looking to take its technology from pilot scale to commercial scale in Australia and beyond.

“Manufacturing in deep-tech fields requires huge amounts of expertise and also huge amounts of capital,” Malligan told Renew Economy in an interview on Monday afternoon.

“I think Australia could definitely do these things if we had decades and billions of dollars to invest, but to get to market in a capital effective way and at speed, we really need to utilise the expertise that already exists.

“Ninety per cent of the world’s solar is made in China, and that includes the tooling, it includes the product, it includes …the whole value chain. And so it just really makes sense for us to tap into that and to bring that expertise and partner it with what we do really well in Australia, which is obviously solar technology.

“So yeah, it just makes a lot of sense, both for Australia as an economy, but also for private companies like SunDrive to bring innovations to the world.”

Malligan says the plan for SunDrive, backed by the Arena grant and potentially Sunshot funding, is to build solar module manufacturing capacity first, with Trina, and then to follow that with solar cell manufacturing – a venture it has also agreed to pursue in partnership with AGL Energy at the site of its mothballed Liddell coal plant in the NSW Hunter region.

But to get to end-product manufacturing stage requires setting up production lines, which is where Maxwell and Vistar come in.

“This partnership is really about building the commercial-scale tooling that can be used in manufacturing that include their own manufacturing ambitions. Obviously in Australia, with Trina, but also with distribution through tool sales,” Malligan says.

In return, the China companies get a front-row seat for the progress of SunDrive’s innovative technology, which promises high efficiency at a lower cost and with less supply chain pressure.

“[Their interest in SunDrive is] really around the superior performance of our technology, so being able to drive superior cell efficiencies and more power per cell,” Malligan says.

“We have very long term relationship with Maxwell, including, together, we broke the world record for cell efficiency. And so it’s really about, how do we turn that into something that is at commercial scale? As I think all parties have very strong reason to believe that there will be a strong market for world leading solar cells in terms of their performance.”