092
COMPANY FOCUS
5B – Quantum of solar With a team of renewable energy experts who care about making solar projects cheaper, faster and smarter, 5B is reinventing solar energy from the ground up. By Brent Balinski. It is the week of launch day at solar system innovator 5B’s new headquarters and clean tech campus at Mascot, a few kilometres south of Sydney’s CBD. After a quick look at its warehouse and proving ground, we walk past a big pile of unboxed monitors and desks that are yet to have chairs wheeled under them. The mood is friendly but urgent. There is a place to get into shape, an event for hundreds fast-approaching, and stuff everywhere. Last year was a breakout one for a company moving at a rate that guarantees this article – written in mid-December – won’t include important recent events. 5B gained a presence in three new countries in 2021, is in the middle of a $50m capital raise at the time of writing, and has just announced that it has acquired its manufacturing partner since 2018, IXL Solar. “We used to manufacture internally three years ago and then IXL took it all on,” explains CEO Chris McGrath, who co-founded the company in 2013 with Eden Tehan. “ And now we’re kind of bringing it back in.” He adds that though it will be taking on assembly of its groundmounted solar arrays – which are rapidly deployable and then redeployable, and which fold and unfold, piano accordion-like – the vision is not to be a volume producer itself. It’s about helping enable a massive, planet-wide shift towards abundant, cheap solar energy. Rather than a pure manufacturer or designer or builder or some combination of those, 5B sees itself as a technology company, and the enabler of an ecosystem of components, logistics, deployment, assembly, operations and maintenance, and deployment partners. “To stand up manufacturing partners when you don’t have your own internal expertise is really hard,” McGrath adds. “You know, you’d try and take someone to do something that you don’t know how to do yourself. So we kind of always maintained our best-in-class example internally, but it’s small-scale.” The company’s system has some similarities to prefabricated construction, which has been blurring the boundaries between manufacturing and the building sector in recent years. The units 5B produces, called Mavericks, transfer the labour away from the construction site and into a factory. The prewired steel-and-concrete arrays with solar panels (the latest version has 48-50 kilowatt capacity) stack four per 40-foot shipping container, and greatly cut installation time, according to 5B.
AMT FEB 2022
This is no small thing for utility-scale, off-grid sites, for example mining clients looking to decarbonise their energy supply in remote locations, says Chief Technology Officer Simeon Baker-Finch. “One person in an air-conditioned telehandler can deploy a solar farm,” he explains. “At the deployment of a 5B Maverick solution, you won’t see hundreds of people scurrying around like ants in the 40-degree heat trying to construct a solar array. When you get to really large-scale scale projects, it has benefits that you don’t realise. With the conventional alternative, ‘Where are the toilets going for 4,000 people? Where’s their kitchen? Are you giving them wifi?’” As an illustration of 5B’s growth, in mid-December its headcount stood at 188, up from roughly 30 staff in August 2020. It counts 52 projects completed and 32 megawatts deployed using its products so far, but as in the example above, single projects in the scale of gigawatts are where the future lies. Manufacturing is not something that needs to be done at massive volumes within 5B’s own factories to get to such individual projects, but manufacturing is nevertheless a vital enabler.
Factory and field Solar Cable’s 20GW Australia-Asia PowerLink (AAPL) project was announced in 2019, and was memorably described as “completely batshit insane” by Atlassian co-founder and Sun Cable backer Mike Cannon-Brookes. He went on to add that the “engineering all checks out”, and 5B has an important role in the project. The Mascotheadquartered company is the preferred technology supplier for the 20 gigawatt solar farm portion of the AAPL project near Elliot in the Northern Territory. A transmission cable running for hundreds of kilometres to Darwin, a big battery at the city of between 36 and 42 gigawatt hours, and a 4,200km undersea cable to Singapore are also planned. According to Sun Cable it could provide up to 15% of Singapore’s electricity needs, and will be producing power for Darwin in 2026 and for export to the Asian city state the year after. 5B would set up a Maverick assembly site at Darwin for the $30bn-plus project, for which construction is scheduled to begin in 2024. There is a wide gap between the size of solar projects 5B has supplied for so far and AAPL, and a big automation and innovation drive lie ahead. The IXL Solar acquisition and the new R&D facilities
