The first technology to be deployed is the Nextpower Ranger, an autonomous inspection robot making its first appearance at an Australian solar farm as part of the trial.

ARENA CEO Darren Miller said innovation needed to extend beyond the module itself as Australia’s renewable energy build-out scales up.

“As Australia builds the renewable energy systems needed to support net zero, innovation will play a critical role in reducing costs and improving productivity across the sector,” Miller said.

“By supporting the trial of multiple innovation projects under a single funding portfolio, we can test technologies more quickly in real-world environments and at a greater scale,” he said.

Benoit Froidurot, innovation and development director at Equans Solar & Storage, said the project positioned the company at the front of a shift toward automation in project delivery.

“Lightspeed Solar project proposed by Equans Solar & Storage and supported by ARENA is a tremendous opportunity to pioneer in emerging technologies for site construction and operations, as well as scaling up the use of automated machines and systems,” Froidurot said.

The Lightspeed funding lands against a backdrop of stalled cost reduction in Australia’s utility-scale solar sector.

An ARENA white paper published in July 2026 found the country’s weighted-average installed cost for utility-scale solar had stalled at AU$1.52 per watt, with balance-of-system costs, covering labour, civil works, grid connection and project delivery, now the dominant component of total project costs and largely resistant to reduction even as module prices continue to fall.

That paper directly named Nextpower among the companies testing advanced piling and tracking technologies under ARENA’s broader push to shift attention from cell-level gains toward how projects are actually built.

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