Wind spins strong in Australia’s energy whirl

 

In this video, filmed in partnership with the Australian Financial Review for Australia’s Energy Future, Jason Willoughby, managing director, sales and project finance at GE Australia and New Zealand, discusses the part Australia’s renewable resources will play in our evolving energy mix.

With certainty and bipartisan support for the Renewable Energy Target (RET) set to unlock more than $10 billion of investment in renewable energy in Australia, GE’s Jason Willoughby has the wind at his back. “Australia’s blessed with great renewable energy resources, both from a wind perspective and from a solar perspective,” says Willoughby, the company’s managing director of sales and project finance for Australia and New Zealand. “I speak to colleagues in the US and in Europe, and we compare what the wind speeds in Australia are, and they’re amazed that they’re so good, and well located to where the load is.”

Willoughby believes that Australia has the potential to build very competitive wind farms, and that they will dominate the renewable energy market in the region, along with large-scale solar energy and the ongoing popularity of rooftop solar panels. That said, “The whole energy sector has undergone more fundamental change than we’ve seen in the last 100 years”, says Willoughby, which suggest it’s too early to sketch out a picture of even the near future. “There are two reasons for that,” he explains. “One is the significant and rapid change in technologies, creating new alternatives and new opportunities, and secondly there’s a real focus around environmental impacts. Those two themes or factors are really fundamentally changing the energy sector.”

As technological advancements continue to bring down costs for both renewables and fossil fuels, Willoughby predicts there’s more change to come.

“Battery technology and storage is still to be fully developed and commercialised,” he says. “On the demand side, we’ve got things like electric vehicles, which really are in an embryonic stage … that again is going to have an impact on ... the energy market [and] also create new opportunities for electricity demand.”

The resolution around the RET will, adds Willoughby, “give the private sector the opportunity to come in and innovate … from a technology perspective, but also from a business-model perspective.”

GE is walking the talk as a stakeholder in south-western Victoria’s $450 million Ararat Wind Farm, a project developed by RES Australia. The contract was signed just days after the new RET legislation passed into law and GE is both a 25% financial partner and the supplier of 75 3.2-megawatt wind turbines, the output of which will power around 120,000 homes a year.

“The onus is on us as an infrastructure technology company to continue to spend money on innovative technology, and we do that by spending around $US6 billion a year on R&D,” says Willoughby, “and then working with our customers to implement that technology into new business models.”