The Australian Renewable Energy Agency, also known as ARENA, is the federal government’s response to the lack of infrastructure and investment into the future of electric heavy vehicles in the country.
Since its founding in 2012, it has invested nearly $10 billion across the Australian renewable energy industry, with a direct $2.25 billion in grants funding for projects related to electric trucks and infrastructure.
It’s not just transport that ARENA focuses on – in 2024 alone it has also provided funding to projects in aviation, mining, consumer energy, food manufacturing, robotics, wastewater, buses and more.
In November it announced that $100 million in funding was available under its ‘Driving the Nation’ program dating back to 2022, which tackles three focus areas in transitioning heavy vehicles in fleets across the nation to electric.
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Major operators including Linfox ($19.6 million) and Toll ($9 million) are set to benefit from this investment, but smaller transport businesses have also been reaping the rewards across various sectors of the transport industry.
2025 is now set to be one of the biggest years for the funding of electric projects through ARENA, and could set the scene for major change in how Australian fleets look.
“We’re going to have $100 million in funding to support other recipients over the next year or year and a half,” says ARENA knowledge sharing manager Adrian Salinas.
“There’s currently about 20 projects in different stages of completion. Some of them have already been announced, with people working and completing milestones.”
Several projects in Western Australia have been completed over the past few years, which Adrian says they are particularly proud of.
Operators Patrick Terminals and Centurion have both previously received funding to transition their fleets and upgrade their infrastructure to support a higher volume of working electric trucks.
This funding is removing one of the biggest roadblocks for those interested in moving to electric, being the cost, which has continually been referenced as one of the major challenges in making the switch.
Patrick was awarded $2.5 million in an effort to reduce its emissions at what is WA’s largest container port in Fremantle, which sees a massive volume of both freight and vehicles moving through it.
That money allowed them to deploy nine battery electric terminal trucks and set up fast chargers in a first for the port.
“Patrick takes all these small trucks that move cargo containers in the port, uses them to take the containers from the ship and put them in the trailers themselves,” Adrian says.
“So now all of their operations inside of the port happen with zero emission vehicles. Those are heavy trucks that are moving containers inside of the port.”
The funding for Centurion’s project was another major one, providing them with both a massive addition of electric trucks to their fleet and the infrastructure to go with it.
$15.8 million from ARENA was put towards 30 battery electric trucks and 15 dual port chargers to not only cut their emissions, but increase their capacity to operate their new trucks.
“Centurion’s issue that they had was there’s not enough electricity on the grid to power their trucks,” Adrian says.
“What they did was utilise land that they had next door, and they installed a solar farm to power the trucks. That was a big project for Western Australia.”
While ARENA is continuing to grow the amount of transport projects that it is funding, it wasn’t even initially a focus area.
But as they’ve continued to talk to industries across the country, transport continued to come up. Initially they had looked into light vehicles, including commercial vehicle fleets, but the heavy sector needs greater investment to impact the path to decarbonisation.
“We’ve looked at a number of different jurisdictions, in Queensland, New South Wales and Victoria, and they’re all talking about heavy transport,” Adrian says.
“Going back, transport wasn’t part of the plan to start with, but the opportunity came when looking at renewables in the future, and the largest user of electricity will be transport. We started in the light passenger sector to start with, but in 2022 we decided to start in heavy transport for two reasons.
“The main one is that transport operators are really keen to decarbonise because all they think about is total cost of ownership. They’re not running trucks across the country for fun, they’re a business.
“In terms of emissions, the heavy transport sector is one disproportionately representing the amount of emissions with transport. We need to start taking care of that sector if we really want to decarbonise transport as a whole.”
Infrastructure focus
One of the funding areas that ARENA announced under the Driving the Nation program in 2023 was a focus on electric vehicle charging solutions and infrastructure, with $70 million committed.
While this particular funding round was focused on public charging and innovation in the management of charging, they have since looked to privatised infrastructure.
ARENA funded a project to the tune of $8.5 million for fleet electrification specialist Zenobē, which is incorporating off-site charging as one solution for electric fleets that lack the infrastructure needed to operate efficiently.
This is being put towards establishing an ‘electric charging hub’ in Mascot, Sydney to be used by Woolworths to charge its electric vehicles.
It will contain 22 dual-port chargers all equipped with smart charging software to optimise energy use while also using stationary battery storage made from repurposed batteries from old electric vehicles.
The site will support a fleet of 60 electric trucks leased to Woolworths and will also have the capacity to expand, creating a multi-user charging facility.
This particular hub is servicing trucks that are doing local deliveries – all on the smaller end of the scale at predominantly 4.5 tonnes.
While they won’t travel far from South Sydney, they still require a full day’s worth of charge to operate their routes.
With the hub being leased to Woolworths, this opens the door for other companies to lease out the space to charge their trucks in the future.
This could be a solution to provide charging infrastructure across a number of fleets without needing as much space that would be required for companies operating a full fleet of electric trucks.
“Let’s say I wanted to put a charging hub next door to a trucking company, the main thing I need is access to the land, and the second is connection to the grid,” Adrian says.
“We’re talking years back and forth to negotiate your lease agreement for the land and your connection agreement. What Zenobe did very cleverly is they partnered with Ausgrid, so the land belongs to the electricity company.
“Having the approval to connect and the access to the land is not an issue. From day one they are a couple of years ahead of someone that might have a good plot of land, but then has to start a lengthy conversation with an electricity company.
“The charging hub in this case is not installed on your premises or your depot, only servicing you. It’s like a petrol station of the future for heavy transport.
“The Zenobe project is one step closer in the right direction, with land close to the airport and Woolworths as an anchor customer.”
Electric education
The process of progressing the decarbonisation of the transport industry has been addressing the widespread concerns that many within it have when it comes to make the move to electric vehicles.
With other options becoming more viable like hydrogen and renewable fuels, businesses big and smaller have a choice to make about which path they are going to follow. And with that choice comes a significant financial investment which for many could make or break their futures within the industry.
Helping operators and businesses to understand where the advantages in electric lie has been another focus of ARENA’s.
“Part of putting the business case forward for this new funding round was spending time with the transport operators themselves,” Adrian says.
“We want to all the conferences throughout 2024. We were everywhere, and what we hear from transport operators is ‘I’m ready, I want to do it, but I don’t know which door is for me’.
“And while the market is still looking at three doors at the moment, people are still not necessarily sure which technology fits the most to their operations and also when that technology is going to be available.”
Attending industry events, conferences and forums has given ARENA a solid picture of what businesses and operators are thinking and the challenges they’re facing on the ground.
They attended an industry forum with more than 150 stakeholders from the heavy transport sector late in 2024, which provided valuable feedback.
“We use opportunities like these to get industry experts communicating to us as a group,” Adrian says.
“We can lay out the benefits of working with hydrogen, the benefits of working with electricity, the benefits of working in the future with low carbon liquid fuels.
“There’s one technology out of these three that you can invest in today, which is electric trucks and electric chargers. If you were on the hydrogen path, that might be more of a 2030 scenario, and by 2035 we’re going to have solutions on the low carbon liquid fuels.
“So right now the funding that is available is for electricity, but we also have plans in the future to invest in these other technologies when and if the time is right.”
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