Entrepreneur declares Australia’s first battery gigafactory
An Australian entrepreneur plans to unleash Anthony Albanese’s dream of making Australia a battery manufacturing powerhouse by building multiple gigafactories nationwide as new cathedrals to the clean energy age.
Brian Craighead’s brand of environmental and industrial evangelism has already attracted former prime minister Scott Morrison and current industry and science minister Ed Husic to visit his brainchild: the nation’s first lithium-ion battery manufacturing gigafactory in Tomago, NSW.
But such batteries will not meet the demands of high performance applications that rely on silicon chips manufactured mainly in Taiwan. Nor are they suitable for electric vehicles.
Energy Renaissance One in Tomago, NSW, is described as Australia’s first gigafactory for battery production.
The 57-year-old founder of eight-year-old start-up Energy Renaissance said the finished Renaissance One gigafactory will employ 700 people at full capacity on a 4500 square metre site, which could scale to produce 5.3 gigawatt hours of energy storage per year.
“Australia has all the minerals in the world you need for batteries, and right now, it’s like selling water in a drought,” he said. “To put it into perspective we could open one gigafactory a month for six years and not meet the current undersupply of batteries. We’re always hopeful of support from federal or state government for expansion capital.”
On Tuesday, Mr Craighead attended a National Battery Strategy roundtable in Canberra hosted by Mr Husic, ahead of an official open for Renaissance One scheduled in July.
At scale, the gigafactory could earn $500 million in annual sales within five years the entrepreneur, who is born and raised in the Scottish town of Aberdeen, claimed.
His formative days in the offshore oil and gas industry “sucking up oil and gas on a Chevron rig” pushed Mr Craighead to head overseas, spending the last 25 years in Australia developing clean energy and digital tech projects.
The Energy Renaissance project is funded by a small group of private, high net worth investors united by a belief in the energy transition and Australian manufacturing. They have invested around $23 million to date. Another $2 million has come from government groups CSIRO and the Advanced Manufacturing Growth Centre (AMGC).
“Energy security is of national importance now,” said Mr Craighead. “We’ve done a great job selling the world wool and buying back jumpers, but we don’t want that with batteries, we want to make everything here.”
Australian sourced
The vision for the gigafactory is to use 92 per cent Australian sourced materials to manufacture batteries and support the government’s target of shoring up the nation’s sovereign manufacturing capacity.
The batteries will store power for industrial, agricultural, commercial or utility sites and be designed with Australia’s climate in mind, in rows of power banks slightly taller than a household fridge, Mr Craighead said.
Renaissance Energy founder Brian Craighead. The group is due to become the first company in Australia to manufacture large-scale lithium-ion batteries.
They’ll also be used in heavy vehicles “to drive big power”, but not electric cars.
“By [battery] component if you take out all the parts and lay them on the ground the screws, bolts, wires and plastics, 92 per cent of those components are sourced in Australia,” he said.
“Today we’re making the batteries. The final step is to make the cells, so we’re entirely vertically integrated. Now, basically 100 per cent of cells in this country are imported. The reality is China has jumped ahead of the world, which is why you need to make batteries and cells here.”
Mr Craighead said Australian industry can and should make its own chemical-based battery cells, but warned calls for local electric vehicle (EV) battery production are unrealistic due to the location of existing global supply chains.
“For EVs you need a vehicle manufacturing industry around you to buy things, it doesn’t make any sense to do it without that, as it’s a scale thing,” he said.
Today, most of the giant auto assembly plants are in North Asia, East Asia, North America and the European Union, which suggests automakers would decline the option to ship batteries from Australia given the associated higher costs and complex logistics.
Mr Craighead also warned Australia is unlikely to ever produce the high-tech silicon-based semiconductor chips dominated by Taiwan and needed for energy dense batteries.
“The [US President] Biden administration is super-focused on getting silicon, semiconductor manufacturing back to the US, but that’s billions of dollars, we’re too small a country with 25 million people, it’s not viable for us to introduce that type of industry,” he said.
Australia does boast other advanced battery manufacturing businesses. These include Sydney University spin-out Gelion, which listed on the London Stock Exchange in 2021. While Queensland-based battery tech group Graphene Manufacturing Group is listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange and has partnerships with the University of Queensland’s bioengineering and nanotechnology research functions.
