Brookfield lines up Chinese wind, battery and hydrogen giant for Australian renewable plans

Canadian funds management giant Brookfield has lined up another potential major supplier of green energy technologies as it stitches together its plans to spend $30 billion on new renewable and storage assets in Australia.

Brookfield’s plan is to take control of Origin Energy, arguably Australia’s biggest energy utility, and do something that the country’s big utilities have largely failed to do so far – invest heavily in new renewable and storage projects.

The $18.7 billion for Origin that Brookfield leads has been accepted by the board, and is awaiting regulatory approval. If it is approved, Origin’s LNG business will go to US-based EIG, while Brookfield and its co-invetors will take over the utility business and plan to build 12GW of new wind, solar and storage by 2030.

That plan is ambitious enough given the regulatory, market, transmission, supply chain and social licence headwinds that continue to plague new investment in Australia, but Brookfield hopes to at least partly address this by signing up major new suppliers to provide the equipment.

This week, it announced it had signed an MoU with the Shanghai-based Envision Group, which builds wind turbines, battery storage, hydrogen and “power-to-x” technologies.

It follows a similar agreement announced late last month with Indian manufacturing and energy giant Reliance Industries, which has a major shareholding in one of the world’s biggest solar contractors and manufactures its own solar panels.

Brookfield says its intention to facilitate the domestic manufacturing of renewable energy components to help accelerate its investment and the country’s green energy transition.

So far, very little is made in Australia, but Brookfield says an agreement with Envision could lead to Australian manufacture of wind turbines, towers and blades, as well as assembly lines for grid-scale or electric vehicle batteries and hydrogen electrolysers.

“The scale of the task ahead and the amount of equipment required in Australia justifies having best-in-class large-scale domestic manufacturing,” Luke Edwards, the head of Brookfield’s renewable power and transition business in Australia, said in a statement.

“Envision is a world-leading operator with deep energy experience, manufacturing know-how and a track record of setting up successful clean technology supply chains.

“We believe creating resilient and local supply chains for critical decarbonisation equipment will help accelerate and de-risk Australia’s energy transition.”

Brookfield says a manufacturing hub in Australia for clean energy equipment could create about 18,000 direct and indirect jobs, many in existing coal hubs such as the Hunter Valley in New South Wales and the La Trobe Valley in Victoria.

Envision in 2021 signed up to the global RE100 initiative and is the first company in mainland China to commit to reaching 100% renewable electricity by 2025. Its investments include EV charging company ChargePoint and battery market Sonnen.

It designs, sells, and operates smart wind turbines, smart storage system and green hydrogen solutions through Envision Energy, and AIoT-powered batteries through Envision AESC. It also owns Envision Racing Formula E team and has installed 50GW of wind capacity.

It says it sees wind and solar power as the “new coal”, and batteries and hydrogen fuel as the “new oil”.

Kane Xu, the company’s global vice president, said the company was excited to pursue wind power, energy storage and p2X, in Australia with Brookfield.