• On Tuesday, startup Endua launched in collaboration with Main Sequence, the CSIRO and Ampol.
• The business has its eye on creating hydrogen-powered energy storage solutions, cutting down on 200,000 tonnes of carbon emissions annually.
• It could help make renewable energy available 24 hours a day by developing new affordable technology.
• Visit Business Insider Australia’s homepage for more stories.

For as long as the Coalition has been in power, its various prime ministers have been in lockstep on the issue of renewable energy.

Since Tony Abbott, through Malcolm Turnbull’s tenure, to Scott Morrison’s current reign, the argument has been that a country powered by 100% renewable energy fails when the wind doesn’t blow and the sun doesn’t shine.”

Rather than invest in a solution like energy storage, this has inevitably been used to justify prolonging the life of coal plants or mount Australia’s ‘gas-led recovery’.

Reticent to interfere in the free market – at least in this case – Morrison has proclaimed more recently his government is “focused on technology, not taxes”.

A new CSIRO company might well have solved both of those problems for Canberra.

Launching on Tuesday, Endua is the latest startup masterminded by venture science investors Main Sequence, and could provide the missing piece in Australia’s energy transformation in the form of hydrogen-powered batteries.

“There’s a global energy transition underway as we look to eliminate emissions from electricity generation,” Endua CEO Paul Sernia told Business Insider Australia. “In order to do that, we need to be able to store renewables in larger quantities for longer periods of time and green hydrogen is a great way to do it.”

Specifically, Sernia and his team see plenty of potential initially in “off grid communities and remote industries like mining and agriculture”.

“The off-grid market is spending one and a half billion dollars each year on diesel to generate electricity and producing 200,000 tons of carbon emissions, so there’s a really big opportunity to reduce that and provide a flexible, reliable and affordable energy alternative,” he said.

Sernia is a green entrepreneur in his own right, founding electric vehicle (EV) charger Tritium. Following its venture science model, Main Sequence brought him in to lead Endua and commercialise the technology that the CSIRO has spent 15 years working on.

They found an industry partner in AMPOL, rebranded from Caltex, which a fortnight ago outlined a $100 million plan to reduce its carbon footprint.

“When Endua starts building a product, it will effectively already have a major customer in Ampol which is going to be a channel for selling the technology,” Main Sequence partner Martin Duursma said. “It means Endua is going to get fast feedback and produce something that is fit for the market immediately.”

But it also has its eyes on a bigger prize, finding commercial and even residential customers.

“We used to have centralised energy generation. Now we have generation on people’s roofs and at the edge of the grid. What Endua is going to deliver is storing energy there as well and that’s how the grid is going to be transformed over the next 10 years,” Duursma said.

While it’s not entirely novel, the tech has some way to go before becoming ubiquitous in the energy space, Sernia says.

“The challenge right now is that it needs to be made affordable. What we really want to do is produce a system where the cost of your electricity is comparable to what people are using today. And that’s really where the step change needs to occur,” he said. “Australia has the potential to be a great hydrogen powerhouse.”

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