Local company scales up its ambitions

A COMPANY with a foot in both Geelong and New York has its eyes fixed on Australia’s renewable future and wants to see more of the technology behind it designed and built here.

Scale Facilitation hosted a stakeholder information session upstairs at the 1915 restaurant in the Pivot City estate in North Geelong on Wednesday last week, MCed by Scale Facilitation advisory board member Roxie Bennett.

The business networking and financing company aims to remove barriers to businesses commercialising their products and facilitates innovators with the right strategic partners.

Scale Facilitation’s founder and chief executive officer David A. Collard, who grew up in Geelong, spoke to the crowd via videoconference, as did advisory board member United States Army Lieutenant General (ret.) Mark C. Schwartz.

Mr Collard said Scale Facilitation had recently celebrated several milestones, such as registration with the US Patent and Trade Office, launch of its Access New York program for Australian start-ups and SMEs, and expansion of its Australian and United States offices, including occupying a whole floor of New York’s One World Trade Centre from the fourth quarter of this year.

Recharge Industries, part of the Scale Facilitation portfolio, is using artificial intelligence and multinational partnerships to research lithium-ion batteries and create advanced battery manufacturing capabilities in Australia, and Recharge Industries scale officer David Hay also spoke at Wednesday’s session.

He said Recharge Industries was working on constructing a facility in Australia initially capable of generating 5 gigawatt hours (GWh) of storage capacity annually and eventually scaling up to 30 GWh, with the intent of replacing supply chains in the United States with Australian ones.

“We have a unique opportunity to build and shape this from the ground up.”

Mr Collard said China made about 80 per cent of the world’s lithium-ion batteries, but there were enormous opportunities for Australia to get into that market, given Australia produced much of the raw materials that went into those batteries.

Asked about the potential for electric vehicles to be built locally, Mr Hay said: “We really do see an opportunity for Australia to be back in manufacturing in the future, so that’s an exciting look forward into the future, but I don’t look too far forward.”

Mr Collard did not give specifics but said a purchase order had already been received from one of the “largest vehicle manufacturers” for prototype development of a battery, which would go through further feasibility and testing “for inclusion within their Formula 1 vehicle in the 2026 season”.

“So we have relationships that are already at that stage,” he said.

“The other aspect, too, is that people naturally focus on vehicles, but you have supply lines within them.

“You have certain huge industries in the green transition to solar and wind – that’s capturing the energy, if you will, but they all need to store it.”