The Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA) has announced up to $4.96 million in funding for Nextracker to deploy its proprietary solar construction and integrated tracker technologies across multiple solar farms, including the Goulburn River Solar Farm in New South Wales.
Delivered in partnership with solar developers and engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) contractors, this project represents a step forward in automating large-scale solar foundation installation and aims to reduce project risks and overall costs of delivering renewable energy projects in Australia.
ARENA CEO Darren Miller said the project highlights ARENA's commitment to supporting innovative solutions that lower costs of installing large-scale solar farms.
"Ultra low-cost solar is not the solar we know today. Current solar PV technology is sufficiently mature and cost-effective to deploy at scale. However, much cheaper solar is vital to help to decarbonise create green export opportunities and support the decarbonisation of hard-to-abate sectors."
The project marks the introduction of Nextracker's NX Earth Truss foundation solution, a proprietary solar tracker technology, to the Australian market.
Vice President and General Manager of Nextracker Australia Peter Wheale said Nextracker was excited to partner with Australia's leading developers and EPCs to demonstrate its solar tracker and foundation solutions technology.
"Simplifying and optimising the most labour-intensive phase of solar construction for any soil or terrain condition is a real breakthrough. With over 10 GW of solar trackers already deployed in Australia, we're excited to bring technology innovation that not only cuts costs and build time but also enables projects to succeed in sites that were previously too complex or costly to develop."
Unlike traditional piling methods that require a multi-step installation process, NX Earth Truss foundations are installed in a single pass, significantly reducing construction timelines, labour, equipment requirements and ground disturbance. This technology innovation helps overcome barriers to large-scale solar development on hard soils and challenging terrain, making deployment more cost-effective, faster to build and sustainable to scale.
Nextracker's technology is directly aligned with ARENA's Ultra Low-Cost Solar (ULCS) strategy, which prioritises the reduction of balance of plant costs through advanced automation. By demonstrating the effectiveness of NX Earth Truss in the Australian market, the project will provide critical data and best practices to accelerate industry-wide adoption of integrated tracker and foundation installation.
