The Australian Renewable Energy Agency launched its new Investment Plan which lays out new priority areas to accelerate Australia's transition to net zero emissions. Under this new investment strategy, ARENA funding will be targeted towards project that:
Optimise the transition to renewable electricity: ARENA aims to support technologies and projects that have potential to reduce the mean cost of stored electricity used for the purposed of firming in Australia to below $100 per MWh.
Commercialise clean hydrogen: by supporting projects that help pave the way to producing clean hydrogen in Australia at a mean cost below $2 per kg.
Support the transition to low emission metals: To enable the production of low emissions metals and their precursors in Australia at internationally competitive prices for steel value chain (with goal to reduce the manufacturing cost of low emissions steel to below $900 per tonne) and aluminium value chain (with goal to reduce manufacturing low emissions aluminium to below $2700 per tonne)
Scale up carbon capture and storage (CCS) and reduce the cost of soil carbon measurement through supporting projects that will reduce the cost of CO2 compression, hub transport and storage to below $20 per tonne of CO2 and projects that will reduce the cost of measuring soil carbon in Australia to below $3 per hectare per year.
ARENA will focus to scale low-cost production of renewable hydrogen by recognizing projects that prove the technical feasibility and
commercial viability of technologies along the entire hydrogen value chain. This will also include clean hydrogen sources for projects downstream from hydrogen production-in storage, compression, transport and demand use-cases. Funding will be available to support the following high impact innovations:
Reduce the cost of hydrogen produced from renewable energy through technologies and commercial innovations that will lower electrolyser costs, BoP costs and reduce the cost of capital. Projects that unlock the hydrogen production from 10MW scale to 100MW scale and enabling a reduction of electrolyser CapEx will also be eligible.
R&D to demonstrate technologies that tackle technical challenges along the hydrogen value chain including storage, compression and transport which include all hydrogen carriers.
Prove the technical feasibility and commercial viability of hydrogen use cases through innovations and activities that use hydrogen to replace traditional fuels.
To read more on ARENA's new Investment Plan go to: https://arena.gov.au/news/investing-in-australias-net-zero-future/
To check out ARENA current funding opportunities: https://arena.gov.au/funding/