Australia’s ARENA backs AU$25 million Lightspeed trial to cut construction costs at solar sites

The first technology to be deployed is the Nextpower Ranger, an autonomous inspection robot making its first appearance at an Australian solar farm as part of the trial.

ARENA CEO Darren Miller said innovation needed to extend beyond the module itself as Australia’s renewable energy build-out scales up.

“As Australia builds the renewable energy systems needed to support net zero, innovation will play a critical role in reducing costs and improving productivity across the sector,” Miller said.

“By supporting the trial of multiple innovation projects under a single funding portfolio, we can test technologies more quickly in real-world environments and at a greater scale,” he said.

Benoit Froidurot, innovation and development director at Equans Solar & Storage, said the project positioned the company at the front of a shift toward automation in project delivery.

“Lightspeed Solar project proposed by Equans Solar & Storage and supported by ARENA is a tremendous opportunity to pioneer in emerging technologies for site construction and operations, as well as scaling up the use of automated machines and systems,” Froidurot said.

A response to stalled balance-of-system costs

The Lightspeed funding lands against a backdrop of stalled cost reduction in Australia’s utility-scale solar sector.

An ARENA white paper published in July 2026 found the country’s weighted-average installed cost for utility-scale solar had stalled at AU$1.52 per watt, with balance-of-system costs, covering labour, civil works, grid connection and project delivery, now the dominant component of total project costs and largely resistant to reduction even as module prices continue to fall.

That paper directly named Nextpower among the companies testing advanced piling and tracking technologies under ARENA’s broader push to shift attention from cell-level gains toward how projects are actually built.

Lightspeed follows a model that ARENA has already tested at scale through Fortescue’s Pilbara Solar Innovation Hub, which trials multiple construction innovations together across Fortescue’s Pilbara sites and has produced a first milestone report alongside a dedicated report on Built Robotics’ autonomous piling technology trialled at the 190MW Cloudbreak solar PV power plant.

ARENA said Equans’ project will build on that portfolio-style approach, creating further opportunities to test, validate, and share lessons from emerging technologies across the design, build, and operation of large-scale solar projects.

The funding also sits within a broader set of ARENA programmes that target the same underlying problem from different angles. ARENA committed up to AU$105.6 million to 20 research and development projects in August 2026, aimed at reducing the cost of large-scale solar, split between cell and module technology and balance-of-system and operations costs, describing it as the agency’s largest single investment in solar PV research and development to date.

The following month, ARENA launched Launchpad, an AU$30 million programme aimed at early-stage clean energy startups, offering smaller, faster grants to companies working on construction and deployment innovations that ARENA’s larger, research-oriented funding rounds are not well suited to reach.

Both programmes are oriented around ARENA’s “30-30-30” vision, targeting 30% module efficiency, an installed solar cost of 30 cents per watt, and a LCOE below AU$20 per megawatt-hour, all by 2030.

ARENA general manager for solar, Dan Sturrock, has said Australia needs utility-scale solar generation costs to roughly halve, to around AU$25-30/MWh on an LCOE basis, to unlock the 10GW of annual capacity additions the agency judges necessary, compared with the 2-3GW currently reaching financial close each year.