One of the world’s biggest investors in renewable energy infrastructure says the falling cost of solar and batteries is pushing the green energy transition to a “tipping point”, and will underpin the future of energy hungry smelters and refiners and the development of massive new green metals industries.
Quinbrook Infrastructure Investors, founded in Brisbane, is no small fry on the international scene, having invested more than $US7 billion in equity in more than $US30 billion in projects across the globe.
A few weeks ago, it unveiled a plan to roll out half a dozen giant solar batteries – each with eight hours of storage – to provide the reliable low cost power to support new and existing energy-intensive industries across the country.
Its ambition, which might have seemed a little bit “out there” in a country whose political discourse is polluted by claims that only fossil fuel “baseload” can provide cheap and reliable power, was vindicated a week later when mining giant Rio Tinto announced the biggest ever contract for a solar and battery project in the country.
Rio said that the 15-year deal with Edify Energy would help guarantee the future of its giant Boyne Island smelter and associated refineries in Gladstone, which have to move away from coal and gas by the end of the decade or would have to shut down because of the high costs and pollution from fossil fuel generators.
“It’s one thing for Quinbrook to say it, and we’d like to think we have developed a reputation for not saying things we can’t deliver on,” says Quinbrook co-founder and managing partner David Scaysbrook in the latest episode of Renew Economy’s weekly Energy Insiders podcast.
“But it’s another thing for Rio Tinto to come out and say we’re swapping out coal fired power for effectively, something close to base load renewables, predominantly anchored by solar and battery storage technology in a DC couple configuration.
“To an industrial user like Rio, it’s a game changer, and it really gets them over that threshold of cost, particularly when you think about aluminium smelting as one of the most price sensitive industry applications you can have. So, you’re right, we are at a tipping point.”
Quinbrook has already rolled out multiple DC-couple four hour solar battery projects in the US, and this week sealed the finance for the largest solar battery project in the UK. DC-coupled means that the battery is charged from the solar farm, and enables the output to be steady and predictable, and can target the problematic evening peaks.
Scaysbrook says costs have fallen, particularly in battery storage, and energy density has also improved, which means more storage can be put into each container. Together, these have enabled the leap from four hour storage to cost competitive eight hour storage.
“We think Australia is prime time for large scale and dc coupled solar and battery, and we think that is going to be a game changer,” Scaysbrook tells Energy Insiders.
Quinbrook has already talked about plans for a major silicon plant in Townsville to tap into the global PV supply system, but a new idea that is emerging around Gladstone is taking advance of the resource of magnetite ore which are particularly useful for the development of green iron and green metals.
“It’s only 70 kms from a deep water port in Gladstone, it has access to high voltage transmission, and low cost renewable energy. It has logistics. It has water,” Scaysbrook says.
Testing is currently being done to ensure that the magnetite resource has the appropriate concentration of iron, but it is looking promising. “We don’t know 100%, but we’re pretty confident at the point we know that it’ll be a pretty big news.”
“AI and data centers are interruptible. Generally. They would prefer not to be, but they can be. It’s very different to typical cloud operations that that don’t have the ability to be interrupted.
“But if we’re solving this 24/7 conundrum, or getting very close to solving it for green iron, and Rio believes it can be solved for aluminum, then you can solve it for data centers, and you can solve it for anything else that needs 24/7, round the clock, carbon free electricity. We’re not quite there yet, but we’re getting a lot closer than we’ve ever been.”
One of the regions that is being targeted as a potential host of data centres, and other green industries, is the Northern Territory, where Quinbrook has teamed up with Mike Cannon-Brookes’ Grok Ventures for at least the domestic development of the vast Sun Cable solar and battery project.
A Sun Cable 100 MW battery project in Darwin was recently included in a list of priority projects identified by state and federal governments. It may turn out to be a 16-hour battery, but Scaysbrook says that at the very least the eight-hour component will be able to deliver “very low cost power” into the Darwin region.
“Our eight hour battery assists the economics of that materially, as it does in in Queensland, we get very close to sort of our target power costs that that any either green fuels producer or any other large industrial customer that wanted to set up a facility inside the Middle Arm precinct would be keen to access.
“Given it’s a pretty fragile grid system up there, then an eight hour battery would be a great solution for that location. But it’s that’s, that’s a small part of a much bigger story around Sun cable,” he says.
” And if we achieve our objective of delivering low cost power into Darwin and mass DP. Then, of course, that’s low cost power that the other part of the project could export to Singapore.”
And Scaysbrook says the emergence of robotics could bring down the cost of solar even further.
“Where we see a disparity in our installation costs, it’s always in the labor cost. Now what’s on the horizon is, is robotics, right?
“One of the larger, hopes, I think, for cost reduction in solar is robotic installation. So you’re saving money, not only in the use of the robots for the placement of the modules on the racking systems and so on, you can do it at three to four times the current rate of installation.
“And that reduces your time for construction, and that reduction in time and that installation efficiency makes a very big difference to your install cost.
“Solar is not just getting cheaper, it is getting higher in its yield. And if we can also be innovative in the in the use of lower cost installation techniques and reduce our construction timeframes, we can bring the cost of installed solar down by a significant margin.”
See also: You want to build a gas fired power station before 2030? Good luck with that
To listen to the full interview with David Scaysbrook, please go to the latest episode of the Energy Insiders podcast.
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