Saturday, October 17, 2026
The Australian Renewable Energy Agency says it remains confident Australia can expand its onshore solar module manufacturing capacity enough to meet the aspirational target of 1 gigawatt a year, as it seeks to foster competition for the nation’s sole panel maker, Tindo Solar.
Arena this week launched round three of its $850 million Solar Sunshot funding scheme, putting another $250 million up for grabs in the form of production subsidies and grants.
And while the focus for this round has shifted from cells and modules to supporting innovative, cost-cutting construction methods, Arena’s general manager of solar investment Dan Sturrock says the agency has not given up on the dream of Australian made solar.
Currently, Adelaide-based Tindo Solar is Australia’s only PV module maker – a title it has held since it was founded in 2011. Tindo won $34.5 million in Sunshot funding in 2025, to scale up production from 20 megawatts (MW) a year to 180 MW and to test the water for a future giga-scale plant.
A second module manufacturing contender – a company headed up by one of the legends of Australian solar research and development, Zhengrong Shi – in December last year won more than $150 million in Sunshot funding to build a commercial-scale PV panel manufacturing plant in New South Wales.
The Hunter Valley Solar Foundry, which also received $20 million from the state government, proposes to become a 500 MW per annum manufacturing facility that will produce Sunman’s lightweight solar panels, and provide production capability to other manufacturers.
“We see competition as good… [and] there’s room in the market for multiple producers,” Sturrock told Renew Economy’s Solar Insiders podcast on Thursday.
“We do have one more project in the pipeline that’s not yet announced, so … watch this space for potentially a third project. But we were always hoping to get to a gigawatt and we still hope that we might achieve that.”
Tindo in 2024 set out its own ambition to build a solar panel “gigafactory” in Australia, a feat it claimed at the time that it could pull off with just $90-100 million and within two years, with the right federal government support.
When Tindo got its SunShot money, in August of last year, federal energy minister Chris Bowen, whose home rooftop solar system uses Tindo panels, said the grant would give Tindo the opportunity to cater for around 10 per cent of Australia’s domestic demand.
But progress is slow and the competition from cheap and abundant Chinese panels is fierce. Sturrock says Arena is always trying to balance accountability – making sure projects are delivering what they have proposed to – while also providing flexibility to allow for evolving pathways and plans.
“We are the custodian of taxpayer dollars, and we take that quite seriously, very seriously. But there is that balancing act of, you want to work really closely with those companies to achieve success and sometimes acknowledging that you’re not going to achieve every one of the … success factors that you set out to achieve.
“So you’ve got to be balancing up, you know, what’s really important and how you continue to manage that funding commitment over time as the market changes, competition changes [and] regulations change.”
SunDrive – a solar cell innovator spun out of the University of New South Wales (UNSW) – in 2024 applied for round one Sunshot funding in partnership with Chinese PV giant Trina, with a proposal to set up a module manufacturing plant in Western Sydney, with an initial production capacity of 1.2 gigawatts (GW).
The bid was not successful, although SunDrive – whose technology uses copper for solar cell metallisation, instead of silver, making cells cheaper to produce – has had strong support from Arena through other programs, including a $25.3 million grant through the Advancing Renewables Program.
“We’ve supported [SunDrive] with their core technology development… [and] that’s been going for about a year now and they’re continuing to bring their novel copper-based metallisation technology into the market and looking to sell that at a commercial scale over the next six months,” said Sturrock.
“So we’re, we’re still supporting them with that core technology pathway and we hope to see some real commercial traction in the next 12 months with SunDrive. But I think they’ve stepped away from the module manufacturing ambition, is my understanding.”
Meanwhile, Sturrock says Tindo is in the process of ramping up its production at the new facility in Adelaide and the Hunter Valley Solar Foundry is working towards starting construction next year.
“That [will] be the new competitor producing modules at scale competing with Tindo,” he tells Solar Insiders.
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Sophie is editor of Renew Economy and editor of its sister site, One Step Off The Grid . She is the co-host of the Solar Insiders Podcast. Sophie has been writing about clean energy for more than a decade.
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