A-Lab Impact Report 2018

ARENA’s A-Lab continued to hit goals and bring innovative thinking to the energy sector in 2018. It was an enormous year, with four events held right across Australia, even reaching the remote town of Alice Springs. We had well over 200 people come through our doors, and each worked hard to generate more than 300 innovative new ideas. All great inventions started out as a new idea and we can’t wait to see which ones are brought to life in the coming months. Our community is certainly doing its part to accelerate Australia’s transition to renewable energy.

Some notable highlights included the launch of the Distributed Energy Integration Program (DEIP), announcing $19 million in funding for Short-term Forecasting and Distributed Energy Resources (both ideas borne from 2017 A-Lab events), and running our first ever three-day project incubation program – Incubate 2018.

We want to take this opportunity to share with you what we’ve learnt, what we’ve achieved and how we did it in 2018. We are extremely proud of the progress we’ve made. Whether it was cultivating greater industry collaboration to optimise distributed energy; to exploring the integration of renewables in industrial processes; or, working through how the Northern Territory might reach its 2030 renewable energy target – one constant remained. We thought big!

Feedback from events continue to show that ARENA’s unique strength is the ability to put the right people in the right room to generate the right conversations. In the coming year A-Lab will continue to bring together a diverse network of people with the expertise and passion to create change. Or, as one A-Lab participant described, we will continue to “put people together in creative ways… [to] generate incredible ideas to solve our biggest challenges.”