Doorstop at Hazelmere, Western Australia

JOSH WILSON: Good morning, everyone. It's fantastic to be here at Fortescue Zero in Hazelmere in Perth, and today we're making an important announcement. A commitment of $10 million from the Australian Renewable Energy Agency, from ARENA, to support Fortescue’s Heavy Battery Electric Vehicle Project. It's the first grant being made under the Industrial Transformation Stream of the Albanese Government's Powering the Region's Fund, and it's really, really significant, because it means that Fortescue will be taking the next step on the impressive work they've already done when it comes to decarbonising industrial transport.

They've already done some really impressive work with both hydrogen fuel cell and electric vehicles, some of the vehicles that would, frankly, take the community by surprise to the extent that we're getting comfortable with passenger electric vehicles. But you might think that it's a bridge too far to get to the point where you have electric 240 tonne haul packs. Well, Fortescue are already there, and this project will help them go further. It helps them develop fast charging technology that means that those trucks can be charged within 30 minutes. And of course, it's a critical part of our broader decarbonisation agenda.

We need to do everything, everywhere, all at once as we progress to net zero by 2050, and there are some hard to abate parts of our economy, including minerals resources and heavy industry, but it is actually possible for us to make really rapid progress in decarbonising transport in these environments, and there are so many benefits from doing that. It gives those companies, and it gives Australia as a whole, the ability to be much more self-sufficient when it comes to energy, much less dependent on liquid fuel.

Australia does rely very, very significantly on liquid fuel, where we're highly dependent on that, and therefore vulnerable to interruptions in supply and to price volatility. When we make the kind of transformation that Fortescue Zero is pioneering, we will be able to be masters of our own energy destiny. We'll be able to have energy for transport that is cheaper, that is cleaner in terms of pollution generally, and that makes a contribution to reducing emissions as part of that global cooperative task, that challenge to tackle dangerous climate change, and to get to net zero by 2050.

So, the Albanese Labor Government is leaning into this kind of innovation. We want Australia to be a technology leader, a technology maker, not necessarily a technology taker. We can take all of our existing strengths in minerals and resources and heavy industry and parlay them into further strengths, both for our own benefit and as benefits that we can share on an export and technology sharing basis with our region. So, this is a really exciting development, as I say, it's the first grant under the Industrial Transformation Scheme of the Powering the Region's Fund, $10 million from ARENA to go into what is a $35 million project. I'll invite Shelley to tell you a little bit more about it.

SHELLEY ROBERTSON: Thank you, Josh, and welcome to our Hazelmere facility. It's great to have you all here today to witness this amazing event. So, receiving this funding from ARENA is critical to Fortescue in accelerating our program, in decarbonizing the Pilbara, because you will all know that we have an ambition to be real zero by 2030, up in the Pilbara. So, these charges are any really important part of that for us on our journey.

We're here in WA, a lot of the work is being done right here in Hazelmere, and we're very proud to be a West Australian company that's actually helping to develop industry right here. And of course, this technology will go further in helping others, our competitors and others in the industry and in other industries as well, to actually help them to decarbonise so great opportunity. And thank you again.

WILSON: I’ll take a few questions on the announcement, then I'm happy to take a few general questions.

JOURNALIST: You talk about [inaudible] access by your competitors. Are there any stipulations [inaudible], if that's the case, is this open access to other companies, are they able to learn from this and adapt it for themselves?

WILSON: Yeah, it's a good question. I mean, it's always part of ARENA funding, as people would expect that when the government supports an innovative pioneer like Fortescue to go and undertake a project like this, part of the deal, of course, is that some of those innovations and the learnings that come from the project are shared. And that's exactly what we would expect in this case, that as we see projects like this go forward and prove that we can move away from a reliance on diesel, even in difficult to abate parts, difficult to decarbonise parts, of our world that others will follow suit.

Fortescue has already found that the efficiency comparison between diesel and some of these electric and hydrogen fuel cell vehicles is very close even now. We know from the technology curve that that will only get closer and then ultimately the electric and the hydrogen fuel cell technologies will become cheaper in themselves, in addition to those other benefits, the energy self-sufficiency, the lower pollution, and the decarbonisation.

JOURNALIST: Can I ask a question about rooftop solar…

WILSON: Sorry, just any other questions about the project?

JOURNALIST: One for Shelley? [inaudible] we've talked to a lot of fleet hire companies, because one of the big roadblocks for them in being to electrify their fleet, is that mine sites don't have chargers. Will this project be able to include capacity for light vehicles as well?

ROBERTSON: So, we certainly have light vehicles in our sites, because everything on our site will be decarbonised by 2030, including the LVs. The chargers that we're actually going to be implementing on site are agnostic and it'll be right across the whole fleet of vehicles. So, there's the big trucks, the big Leibherr T-240s that we with we've seen today, also the excavators and the other sort of equipment that we have on site, including LVs.

JOURNALIST: With the technology advancing so quickly and being able to charge these vehicles, what about the actual generation of renewable energy? I think, Fortescue are saying, these two megawatts, at least maybe three megawatts, gigawatts sorry, 100 gigawatt solar farm. Are you going to be able to keep up with the renewable energy demand?

ROBERTSON: Well, certainly for our own operations, that's the ambition. So, we're building two and a half gigawatts up there in solar and wind, in the Pilbara, and also then having battery to actually support the downtime there, and we'll be looking at different ways to operate around that new renewable energy system that we're installing in the Pilbara.

JOURNALIST: So, you’ll build all that renewable capacity under your own steam?

ROBERTSON: Yes, we will.

JOURNALIST: On your mining cabins?

ROBERTSON: Correct.

JOURNALIST: [inaudible]

ROBERTSON: Yes, it'll all be up and running by 2030.

JOURNALIST: Will that come out of the $6.2 billion bracket?

ROBERTSON: Yes, it will. It's all within the 6.2.

JOURNALIST: Josh, I was going to ask about rooftop solar. The AEMO saying that it might need, at times to be able to switch that off to protect the integrity of the grid. Do you think it should have that power to do that across the states, to shut down rooftop solar if it needs to?

WILSON: What we want is, we want the grids to be managed with all of the inputs and needs that are part of our energy system. We've made a lot of progress when it comes to rooftop solar, in fact we're the highest penetration rooftop solar nation in the world. We crossed the four millionth household the other day. It's one in three Australia wide.
Here in Western Australia, it's two in five. And that's a really good thing, because it's making a big contribution in terms of renewable energy, and it's allowing all of those households to experience the cost savings that come from household solar. Obviously, we need to manage our system, and some of those changes have been in place for a while and some of that kind of systemic management will continue to evolve as we get more and more renewables and storage and the grid transmission upgrades that facilitate the movement of energy within that more dynamic system.

JOURNALIST: Well, you spoke about heavy industry in your earlier comments. Should heavy industry and households, in fact, be worried that Chris Bowen's comments about moving away from always on energy supply?

WILSON: I think what households should be particularly worried about, and probably industrial users as well, is that if we were to go down the path that the Coalition propose, which would take 15 or 20 years to develop, but it would be that nuclear path. One of the things about nuclear is that it will displace cheaper renewables and when you've got nuclear, the deal for those arrangements is that government takes and pays for all of that power and it's very expensive power. We know that the impact to households will be $1,200 on average per annum. We also know that it will be entirely paid for by the Australian taxpayer, so $600 billion that comes out of the government's capacity to fund pensions and health and schools and veterans and all of those things. That's something that I would be very worried about.

JOURNALIST: But you know, is Labor willing to guarantee reliable power supply from coal and gas if it wins next election?

WILSON: Well, providing reliable power, providing cheaper and cleaner power over time, should be the focus of any government. We just had a government that for nine years couldn't have national energy policy. For nine years, didn't even get itself together sufficiently to have a national energy policy, and during that time, we saw energy capacity decrease nationwide. We saw more energy come out of the system than we saw added to the system through the previous nine years. There's no way we could have continued with that. We now have a government that is taking responsibility for managing the energy transformation, getting more renewables and storage into the system, undertaking the grid transmission upgrades that were always going to be necessary under any circumstance, making sure that Australia's energy supply is reliable, self-sufficient, cleaner and cheaper right now and in the longer term.

JOURNALIST: We've got a lot of solar and wind projects on paper in Western Australia at the moment under development, but a bit of a hole in actually building them. Is that a concern here to the federal government, that we seem to have this passage of time where nothing's actually getting built?

WILSON: Oh, look, I wouldn't be concerned about that. I think there are projects going ahead pretty smoothly here in Western Australia, and in particular, a couple of very significant battery storage projects. WA as a jurisdiction, is probably ahead of the game when it comes to battery storage, and that's partly because we have a system that isn't connected to the NEM, the SWIS is a standalone system. The government's also been clear in charting a path that sees us no longer relying on coal fired power, and that's something that's distinctive about the Western Australian jurisdiction. I think a lot of people welcome that, because they know that we need to get out of coal fired power as part of our work to address dangerous climate change. But I mean there are projects that are in development, and have been delivered in Western Australia over the last several years that have continued to take this jurisdiction down the path towards more renewables and more storage, which is in Australia's best interest.

JOURNALIST: You're talking about storage which is being built. We're talking about anything that puts the power into that storage, the wind and the solar panels which aren't being built at the moment.

WILSON: Well, those projects have been delivered and are being delivered, and of course, the Australian Government is supporting that through the Capacity Investment Scheme. The experience to date has been that there's plenty of interest and appetite in being part of that. That's the case across Australia, certainly the case here in WA. So, I don't have any concerns on that.

JOURNALIST: Josh, companies like Fortescue will face a lot of approval hurdles to get all of that renewable capacity built by 2030. What can the government do to streamline the approval of projects? Because there's a big land footprint, there's big Native Title considerations when you're building solar and wind farms in the Pilbara or anywhere else.

WILSON: Well, in the last two years, we've seen an increase in renewable energy Australia wide of 25%, so there's no real evidence that there's trouble in bringing those projects on. I don't think Fortescue have encountered those problems, and I haven't heard about project approval issues. One thing people should know is that under this government, project approvals have been delivered in a timely way to a much greater extent than what occurred before. One of those reasons was because under the previous government they cut 40% of funding out of the Department of Climate Change and Energy and the Department of Resources - one of the biggest consequences of that is proper rigorous improvements take longer to conduct and take longer to deliver. Now, in the two years of this government, a 25% increase in renewable energy deployment, energy generation capacity increasing instead of falling, a proper national energy policy which Australians should rightly expect from their federal government, and a system of approvals that has delivered timely approvals to a much greater extent than the Coalition.

JOURNALIST: [inaudible]

WILSON: Well, I'm here today announcing the very first grant from ARENA under the Industrial Transformation Stream. That's a $10 million grant for a $35 million project. We are obviously providing that security and recognising the importance of decarbonising transport sectors in Australia on the path to being self-sufficient when it comes to energy, not being as dependent or vulnerable when it comes to liquid fuels, as well as the pollution reduction, as well as the decarbonisation benefits. We are leaning into that through ARENA and the CFC, through the Powering the Regions Fund, through our Future Made in Australia project. All of those things, making sure that Australia is the best form of itself in the future, a country that is a technology maker not a technology taker, that is leading the way as part of global energy transition.