Greater governance needed to support battery development

One of the leaders in Australian battery capability has called for sharper standards, certification and licensing. That and an emerging skills shortage were hampering the development of a domestic battery industry. It’s come from the director of the Energy Storage Research Group based at QUT, Associate Professor Joshua Watts, who referred to more mature battery markets overseas as being well supported in the development phase by governance processes. Australia had some catching up to do to be able to fully compete in a market described by the Future Battery CRC as having a $16.9 billion value-add upside domestically, according to Professor Watts, whose team tests various battery materials technologies at different scale for different applications. Negotiations were continuing with state and federal governments to upgrade the value chain, he said. “Overseas in the UK, the States, Japan, among others, where they actually have quite mature and booming battery energy storage industries, there's always a complimentary support hub somewhere nearby that can do all of the testing required,” Professor Watts said. “All of the certification required, all of the work that's needed to be done to inform standards development for the different technologies across the whole battery value chain. “To get those materials to commercial maturity, you have to put them into and make high-quality batteries to test and benchmark and go through a scaling process to demonstrate that those materials work at the lab scale, small scale, and working up towards commercial cell formats. “That's a huge development cycle and that's a big reason why battery technology takes a long time to get to commercial maturity. Then to enable adoption of these commercial products, installers of these systems need something that they can comply to get them out into the field and operating safely to meet the net zero transition requirements.” Demand for staff in the battery space was booming overseas in line with investment in the industry said Professor Watts. Australia was likely to need to replicate its current workforce to service growth in the local industry, he said. “These companies are looking at five times their workforce and more, and so it is likely in Australia as we move towards electrification, we're definitely going to see it happening here,” he said. “It already is.” “We have a skill shortage. So that's the other big one, keeping our people in the country, as there are huge opportunities overseas at the moment. So making sure that there's a way to skill up and train our people to be able to enter the clean energy jobs, but also keep them here as well. “I'm definitely seeing that skill shortage and it ranges all the way through down to student recruitment as well, like HDR (postgraduate) students, it is really hard to get HDRs at the moment. That's across all universities for lots of different reasons.” The vision of the QUT Energy Storage Research Group is to support, enable and grow battery industries within Australia through expansion upon strong foundations to become a national leading, globally recognised centre for excellence in battery research, technology, standards, safety and accreditation.

Greater governance needed to support battery development

Industry Queensland

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