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This article is part of the AFR Energy Awards special report, published on 22 October 2024.

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Solar array company 5B can have a solar farm up and running almost 10 times faster than traditional installations, and lithium miner Liontown Resources is among the mining groups in its expanding customer base.

The company has been named winner of the category of Innovation for a challenger in The Australian Financial Review Energy Awards.

About 30 per cent of the group’s work is in the off-grid mining market, where customers are keen on 5B’s unique technology, chief executive David Griffin says. It prefabricates large arrays at its Adelaide plant and transports them to remote sites, where they are “unfolded” in movements similar to a piano accordion.

“That market itself is growing very quickly,” he says.

5B’s chief executive David Griffin. The company has a string of investors and is growing fast.

Speed is crucial as companies clamour to have renewable energy systems up and running quickly. “Depending on the job, it’s probably closer to 10 times faster,” Griffin says of the construction speed.

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The latest system it has installed is at Liontown’s lithium mine in the Kathleen Valley, about 680km north-east of Perth. About 342 of the 5B Maverick arrays have been installed, covering a land area equal to 17 rugby league grounds.

It generates enough energy to power 4000 homes and is part of an integrated system that also encompasses a wind farm, battery and firming LNG power plant.

Zenith Energy, owned by Pacific Equity Partners, OPTrust and Foresight Partners, has been overseeing the broader energy project for Liontown.

The 5B Maverick solar array, which is usually about 40 metres long and 6 metres wide, is pre-assembled at its plant in Adelaide into an accordion-like structure, which is pre-wired and then transported to the site. It is unfolded off the back of a truck using a forklift.

Faster solar deployment is crucial to speeding up the pace of the energy transition, which has fallen behind schedule and thrown doubts over the ability of advanced economies to hit emissions reduction targets.

Among 5B employees are two former Holden workers in the assembly of the systems at the Adelaide plant, in a valuable transfer of skills. Car maker Holden shut down its vehicle manufacturing factory in the northern Adelaide suburb of Elizabeth in 2017.

“It’s a skill set that we almost lost completely in Australia,” Griffin says.

The company, which is busiest in Western Australia, has a string of investors and is growing fast. United States clean energy group AES Corporation is the largest shareholder with about 32 per cent, while BP has 10 per cent and venture capital group Artesian holds 8 per cent.

It has been relying on private capital to fund expansion, but Griffin says the dynamic nature of financial markets means that a public listing cannot be ruled out “down the track”.

Liontown Resources’ Kathleen Valley lithium mine, which has installed a 5B solar array.

Liontown had its first lithium production at Western Australia’s Kathleen Valley in late July. The mine and processing plant were built for $951 million and foundation customers for the battery mineral include South Korean-based LG Energy Solutions, electric vehicle maker Tesla and car manufacturer Ford.

The 5B Maverick system is being used on 150 project sites in nine countries. The latest is the Cambridge solar-to-hydrogen demonstration site in the United Kingdom in October. It requires about 70 per cent less labour for installation.

A growing number of the company’s arrays are on sites that are being repurposed. Systems have been installed on a rock dump at Northern Star’s Jundee mine in WA and a former rubbish dump in Albury in regional NSW.

One of the company’s largest projects is a 26-megawatt off-grid solar array at the Bellevue Gold mine in Western Australia.

The Maverick arrays are hurricane and cyclone-proof and can withstand winds of up to 260km/h, making them ideal for tropical locations such as the Tiwi Islands north of Darwin, where a 1.2MW system was installed in 2023.

Griffin took the reins from 5B co-founder and former CEO Chris McGrath in November last year.

A director and early seed funder of 5B, he stepped down as CEO of Sun Cable a few months earlier, after the ambitious $35 billion, 20-gigawatt solar and battery development in the Northern Territory was bought from administrators by tech billionaire Mike Cannon-Brookes.

McGrath founded the company with Eden Tehan after the two met at renewable energy company Infigen, which was bought out by Spanish renewables giant Iberdrola in 2020.

Kapture solution for diesel

Kapture, a finalist in the Innovation category for a challenger, has technology that captures carbon dioxide emissions from diesel generators before they are released into the atmosphere.

The intellectual property is owned by the company, founded in 2022 by Raj Bagri, and took 18 months to develop.

Bagri says the Kapture technology uses a device retrofitted to an exhaust, and a solvent inside a piece of hardware in a tank. The carbon dioxide is removed from the exhaust stream in a one-step process.

The captured carbon dioxide is then embedded into concrete during its production. Kapture has signed a memorandum of understanding with pre-cast concrete group Permacast and is running lab trials to sequester carbon dioxide.

Kapture is also moving to a commercial pilot with one of the largest energy companies in Australia in the next few months, Bagri says.

She says Kapture’s technology is different to that of rivals because it has “zero back pressure” and also has significantly reduced the energy consumption needed to capture carbon dioxide.

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