Solar firm 5B readies Indian manufacturing after $50m US deal

5B’s largest project to date is a 26-megawatt off-grid solar array at the Bellevue Gold mine in Western Australia, with 140 megawatts of total deployments.

The new US project – estimated to cost north of $50 million to build – will increase that by half. The contract value was undisclosed.

Chief executive David Griffin said the company was negotiating much larger projects with demand underpinned by consistently falling solar costs.

“We still serve those more modest size projects in the tens of megawatts, but we’re also seeing and actively negotiating on hundreds of megawatt projects,” Mr Griffin said.

“Everybody who exports is conscious of the amount of carbon embedded in their product, and they’re really trying to find ways to decarbonise, so there might be noise.

“But the key things that drive this deployment – the cost and the ultimate demand – are very, very strong. So I don’t see that changing.”

The latest version of 5B’s technology – Maverick 3.0 – allows even faster deployment.

Maverick arrays are hurricane and cyclone-proof and can withstand winds of up to 72 metres a second (260km/h), making them ideal for tropical locations such as the Tiwi Islands north of Darwin, where a 1.2 megawatt array was installed last year.

Waaree is India’s largest solar panel maker and 5B has struck a deal with Waaree Renewable Technologies – its engineering and construction arm – to build a plant to make Maverick solar arrays across the road from a large panel manufacturing plant in Gujarat province.

That proximity will integrate panel and Maverick manufacturing more efficiently than 5B’s existing plant in Adelaide, which has been assembling panels shipped from China into Maverick arrays.

The US government has cracked down on the use of Chinese panels, a restriction the Indian plant will conveniently skirt.

The plant will produce its first modules in April and construction of the 70 megawatt Gujarat solar farm in the US will begin in the second half of the year.

Mr Griffin took the reins from 5B co-founder and former CEO Chris McGrath in November, with Mr McGrath citing a need to move to the next stage of the company’s commercial development after 10 years spent bootstrapping it.

A director and early seed funder of 5B, Mr Griffin stepped down as CEO of Sun Cable a few months earlier, after the ambitious $35 billion, 20 gigawatt solar and battery development in the Northern Territory was bought by tech billionaire Mike Cannon-Brookes from administrators.

Mr McGrath founded the company with Eden Tehan after the two met at renewable energy company Infigen, which was bought out by Spanish renewables giant Iberdrola in 2020.

A $50 million series B funding round in 2022 brought BP’s venture arm, AES, and VC backer Artesian on to the register.