As the Productivity Commission challenges the Albanese government's plans to subsidise a national electric battery industry, a Illawarra-based start-up is launching a homegrown solution to the issue of energy storage.
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Green Gravity launched its GravityLab in a former BlueScope steelworks warehouse on Thursday, July 20.
The technology uses a pulley system and weights as a method of storing and generating renewable energy and proposes to locate its rigs in former mine shafts.
Green Gravity CEO Mark Swinnerton said the system avoids the issues plaguing other storage solutions.
"The technology offers incredible sustainability credentials and has no waste streams," he said. "It has an ability to re-use infrastructure, and it has very low critical resource utilisation."
The launch comes as the Productivity Commission, in its Trade and Assistance Review released on Thursday, July 20, criticised government support for specific industries, including the Albanese government's planned National Battery Strategy.
"As a small open economy, our future prosperity depends on global economic integration and low trade barriers," Productivity Commission deputy chair Dr Alex Robson said. "It is unlikely to be in Australia's interests to try and compete in a protectionist contest via large scale industry assistance."
The battery strategy, which recently completed consultations, suggests supporting the nascent industry through loans and potentially local content quotas, in response to massive government subsidies for clean energy technology in the United States and the European Union. However, the Commission warned against Australia following in the footsteps of its much larger trading partners as the costs would outweigh the benefits.
"The world's largest economies are increasingly engaged in policies to favour selected domestic industries through subsidies, local content rules and trade barriers. In many cases this is simply a form of old-fashioned protectionism," Dr Robson said.
Speaking on the sidelines of the Green Gravity launch, member for Cunningham Alison Byrnes said the government needed to look across the technology spectrum when it came to meeting decarbonisation targets.
"We've got 82 per cent renewables to get into the grid by 2030," she said. "We need to be looking at all the possibilities that we can for renewable energy generation and the storage that goes with it."
Mr Swinnerton said the company hoped to have 29 shafts through the pre-feasibility stage by next year and have signed access agreements for 600 mine shafts around the globe in the next 24 months.
"Our mid term ambition is looking at over 10 gigawatt hours of capacity," he said. Snowy 2.0 aims to have an energy storage capacity of 350 gigawatts.
The 1:30 scale rig in Port Kembla will be used to refine the design of the final set-up and develop a digital model of the operation.
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