HURLL, Mrs Louise, Chief Executive Officer, Stellar PV Pty Ltd CHAIR: Welcome. Although the committee does not require you to give evidence under oath, I should advise that this hearing is a legal proceeding of the parliament and therefore has the same standing as proceedings of the House. The giving of false or misleading evidence is a serious matter and may be regarded as a contempt of parliament. The evidence given today will be recorded by Hansard and attracts parliamentary privilege. I now invite you to make a brief opening statement before we commence. Mrs Hurll : Chair and members of the committee, thank you for the opportunity to appear today. Stellar PV is developing Project Clean Wafers. It's a gigawatt-scale silicon ingot facility in Australia, near Townsville in Queensland. This is a midstream in the solar value chain processing. It's a critical mineral—quartz—that we process, and it's the stage where most of the value is concentrated. Ninety-seven per cent of the ingots and wafers are produced by one country, and it's creating a huge choke point in the process and development of solar manufacturing. The inquiry is examining what creates social licence and lasting economic development in critical minerals projects. Our experience points to a clear answer on this: the benefits are greatest when we process critical minerals here in Australia rather than exporting the value offshore. Today, Australia digs up quartz and exports the quartz—or metallurgical silicon, which is the second step—capturing very little of the value created before it becomes a solar panel. Midstream manufacturing changes that. It creates demand for upstream industries, increases local value-add and supports skilled, long-term jobs for local communities. I want to be specific about what a facility like ours brings, because durable benefit is the foundation of the social licence. A silicon wafer plant is not a standalone facility; it becomes the anchor for a broader industrial ecosystem. It creates demand for high-purity quartz, polysilicon, chemicals, water treatment, recycling, logistics, maintenance services and export capability. That is how a single project like ours becomes a regional co-located industrial development and a diversified ecosystem of advanced manufacturing. Each capability strengthens the next, helping build out staged segments of a domestic solar manufacturing industry rather than one isolated plant. The world is increasingly recognising that energy security depends not only on deploying renewable energy but also on where the supply chain is sourced and where it is controlled. Australia has a long history in the solar industry. We've developed the technology in Australia, and we've worked very closely with the Chinese in R&D and manufacturing in China. We also have really strong trading relationships with our trading partners in the EU and the US. Australia is well positioned, as a result, to play a significant part in allied supply chains with the low-carbon, traceable and responsibly produced alternative supply chain that the international markets are actively seeking. Stellar PV is also conscious that industrial development must be done responsibly. That is why we plan to power our operations with behind-the-meter renewable energy rather than rely on grid capacity needed by the community. This provides us with low-cost renewable energy at globally competitive prices and doesn't push up the cost of electricity for local communities or industry. We are also designing the facility around circular principles, including water recycling and recovery of processed materials, to minimise the impact on the environment. In short, we are using renewables to build renewables, and that is the kind of industry that communities are willing to support. For us, social licence starts with genuine engagement across the whole community. That means respectful engagement with traditional owners, clear heritage processes and meaningful benefit sharing. It also means creating opportunities for local workers—long-term, well paid, stable jobs that help families with the cost-of-living crisis and families who want careers for their kids close to home. It provides opportunities for local businesses to provide services to our facility and for training providers to help train our workforce. Ultimately, we're realistic about the policy environment. The recent budget reprioritised uncommitted funding away from broad clean manufacturing programs towards targeted, near-term measures, and we understand that approach. Our point to the committee is straightforward: well designed, output linked support for the sector is not just a cost. It's an investment that is repaid to the government in multiples through company tax, payroll tax, export income and a more diversified regional economy on top of the advanced manufacturing capability and long-term jobs that it creates. Support should be tied to verified production and standards and stepped down predictably over time. That is targeted, accountable and consistent with where the budget is heading. I'll close on timing because timing is the real risk here, for critical minerals in general but specifically for solar manufacturing. Australia has the opportunity now to establish a position in the global supply chain with a diversified, low carbon and traceable product. But the opportunity is not going to remain open indefinitely. The US, the EU and South-East Asia are actively building steps in their solar manufacturing capability. If Australia moves at pace, we can absolutely secure our position in allied market supply chains and capture far more value from our resources. If we hesitate too long, we risk remaining a country that exports our raw materials and imports the finished product for the energy transition. Our submission sets out practical recommendations to help capture this opportunity: targeted support for first-of-kind manufacturing; streamlined approvals and common user infrastructure at industrial precincts; support for secure, long-term allied market offtake; investment in regional training and skills centres; developing long-term skilled jobs; and nationally consistent traceability and sustainability standards aligned with our export markets. These are practical and accountable steps that will help convert Australia's critical minerals into enduring regional industries supplying low-carbon and traceable critical minerals to our trading partners. We welcome your questions. CHAIR: Thanks very much, and thanks for your submission. There are two elements to your submission that really have piqued my interest. The first is the time factor and the criticality of time. I'd really like you to speak about your company's experience of why, as a committee, as a government and as a country, is the criticality of time so important now? Mrs Hurll : The solar value chain has a number of steps. At the moment in Australia, we dig up the quartz. We produce metallurgical silicon. At the moment we don't produce a polysilicon, the ingots, the wafers, the solar cells, and we do produce the modules at the end of the value chain. We are supporting more— CHAIR:  Can I just stop you there just for clarity purposes. We dig up the silicon and the quartz. Mrs Hurll : Yes. CHAIR: We produce the photovoltaic cells at the other end, but it's this critical middle step that we're having to import. Is that what you're saying? I just want to be really clear about this. Mrs Hurll : In Australia, we dig up the quartz, and we do the very first step of the processing, which is metallurgical silicon. We do that in WA, then we import the solar panels at the end. So we don't do all of the steps in between, which are the polysilicon, the ingots and wafering—which is what we're planning to do—the solar cell piece. Basically, you take the solar cells, you put it between a backing panel, put glass on each side, put an aluminium frame around that, and that becomes a solar panel. So there are some critical steps in the middle of that process. Our particular pieces of interest to us, because 97 per cent of it is made in one country, and that creates a very strategic choke point for— CHAIR: We're talking about China, obviously. Mrs Hurll : Yes. CHAIR: You can speak plainly. Mrs Hurll : Choke point for the ingots and wafering piece. What we're seeing in the US, as a good example of a premium market that is prepared to pay premium prices for an Australian produced alternative supply chain, they are pushing through. They have a lot of module manufacture—solar panels, modules, it's the same thing. They are producing more in the cell space. That cell space is growing. At the moment, it's probably around 10 to 12 gigawatts worth of production. They're growing that up to around 30 gigawatts of production. So they have a gap in that production of around 20 gigawatts that they're trying to fill at the moment. That is predominantly filled by the Chinese in China or in Southeast Asia. The US, in particular, is looking for alternative supply chains because they care about energy security. They are pushing very quickly on AI data centre rollout, reindustrialisation, and they care about defence. So they care very much about these pieces of the puzzle which are controlled by China. The opportunity for Australia is to provide an alternative supply chain, and this piece of the puzzle will go, potentially, directly into that supply chain in the US. We're seeing movement in the US where they're pushing down into ingots and wafering. They only have nine gigawatts worth of ingot and wafering facilities, with no more planned on the horizon, which is where we have that opportunity to step in. If you're looking from a US perspective for a non-FEOC—a non-foreign entity of concern, a US term—then every other ingot and wafering facility, apart from perhaps one in Vietnam, is actually a supply. So we have the opportunity to push into that. If we don't do it in the near term—and I'm talking about pushing forward with this type of project in this early stage so that we're giving confidence to our off takers to buy our product because it's well funded, it's progressing, it's moving quickly—they will go elsewhere to do this. Whether that is another non-FEOC in Southeast Asia, or they do it themselves, they will take that opportunity. But we have really good trading relationships with the US and with the EU. We have really good relationships with China. Our universities have been developing this technology for the last 35 to 40 years. We've been training Chinese students in Australia, and the IP from these universities is going to China. The opportunity of building a solar manufacturing industry, particularly ingots and wafer, in this country allows us then to have R&D in Australia to test that here. There's only one of the particular machines that we use to pull these ingot outside of China. I think it's in Germany. So nobody can actually test these things anywhere else in the world. By building that capability in Australia, you also have the opportunity to test and do R&D in collaboration with those universities and keep that IP onshore as well. CHAIR: What's your timeframe? Mrs Hurll : Our timeframe is to start manufacture by 2029. CHAIR: You're talking about Professor Martin Green, obviously, when you're talking about the 35 years of experience and— Mrs Hurll : Correct. CHAIR: The travesty is that we didn't keep that IP here in Australia when we had the chance. Mrs Hurll : Can I talk to that for one moment. CHAIR: Please. Mrs Hurll : The founder of our business is Ted Szpitalak. Ted was part of Professor Martin Green's team back in the 1980s. He was an engineer who had the specific experience that Martin Green was looking for. He joined that team, and they developed the solar cell technology to the 20 per cent level. That was groundbreaking at the time. It's now obviously more than that, but, at the time, it allowed solar panels to be commercially viable, and they pushed through to making solar panels in Australia in the 1990s. Ted Szpitalak, with Zhengrong Shi, took that technology to China in the early 2000s and started those large-scale manufacturing facilities. We're talking about Suntech, the very first. Ted and another partner started JA Solar, which, at the time it was listed on the Nasdaq in 2007, was the largest manufacturing facility in the world. So the guys that I'm working with have long-term experience in doing this. He then actually tried to bring it back to Australia. This is our enjoyable tidbit. He tried to bring that back to Australia after he listed that company, and he did go to various government levels and asked to bring manufacturing back to Australia. The response was, 'Take it back to China; we don't manufacture in Australia.' So he went to Taiwan and started manufacturing facilities there. He started manufacturing facilities in Canada and now in the US. So we have a lot of experience in doing this. We have really deep relationships with the Chinese because of the legacy that we bring that allows us that technology transfer to Australia in a way that perhaps the US doesn't have. This is our opportunity to take this and run with it, and we will lose that opportunity because everybody else will do it. CHAIR: I'll just speak to that. This is something that I'm really hot on, if I can use that phrase, because over the decades we have been incredibly inventive in Australia, and, unfortunately, we've often created it. The photovoltaic cell is one such thing, and then we let it go. I think there's a really huge lesson for governments and all people, bureaucracies as well, who form part of that chain of enabling to learn—that sometimes we've got to back ourselves. Take that as a comment, not a question. But I'm really happy we went down that avenue, because I think it's important for the committee to understand the history of solar in Australia. We invented solar, basically. Whilst we're not inventing critical minerals and rare earths, we are at the forefront of an opportunity to process and do more value-added manufacturing with them. So I think there are some salient lessons to be learnt. Mrs Hurll : Having that industry in Australia—which we haven't had over the last 25 years—has restricted us from actually rolling out new IP onshore and keeping the value of that IP. It's not just a story about critical minerals per se and the processing of those critical minerals; it's a story of IP and how to keep that IP in this country. But I would probably push it further because I'm quite passionate about the jobs aspect of it. When we look at our society and shipping the industrialisation offshore over the last 25 years, it's time to start shipping that industrialisation back into Australia. And it's going to take 25 years to do it; it's not going to take five years or two years to have that industry come back onshore. And we need to do that in a targeted way. We don't need to bring the entire solar value chain back to Australia. We need to bring key components of that onshore that then work into an ecosystem. For example, Stellar PV's facility will create demand for ultra-high-purity quartz, which we have in Australia and we ship offshore. It will create demand for metallurgical silicon and polysilicon into our factory, but there's also the graphite that we use. We use the high-purity quartz in crucibles into our factory. We use chemical manufacture and water recycling—water purification. There's a whole raft of industry that's going to go into an ecosystem we're trying to develop. We're doing that in conjunction with, as I mentioned earlier, for example, the renewable energy behind the grid. We will work with partners to build solar farms adjacent to our facility and BESS systems adjacent to the facility. Yes, we'll have some grid connectivity. Obviously, that is required to get the ultra-low-cost power that we need to be globally competitive. Building as an ecosystem allows you to diversify the portfolio within that. So it's not like, perhaps, some other industries that have been supported—green hydrogen is an example—where there's one type of unproven technology. This solar technology creates an ecosystem, but it's proven technology. We're not recreating the wheel here. We're taking the technology from China to Australia, and we're building that here. CHAIR: Deputy, would you like to kick off? Mr CHAFFEY: Yes, sure; I've got some questions. Thank you, Mrs Hurll, for your submission and your attendance today. My first question is in relation to your recommendation 4, which calls for a critical minerals-to-manufacturing offtake facilitation service. In the absence of that service today, do you have any binding offtake agreements for Project Clean Wafers' output? And, if not, is the project currently bankable to investors? Mrs Hurll : We are pre-FID and we have been going through a process of fundraising for the last number of months. In Australia, the investment community doesn't have a mandate, let's put it that way, to invest in midstream manufacturing. Manufacturing is not something they're familiar with, comfortable with or investing into. So I'm sure you hear a similar story for anyone in critical minerals—that getting pre-FID funding in Australia is very difficult. CHAIR: Can you spell out that acronym for the benefit of Hansard. Mrs Hurll : Yes, it's final investment decision. The final investment decision is the decision where you decide to put $400 million into your facility. Pre-FID funding, in our case, is not a significant number; it's 10 to 15 million Aussie dollars. And what that allows us to do is to convert our Chinese designs—because the Chinese can produce a design for an ingot and wafering facility very cheaply and very quickly, but it's not to Australian standards, and you need to bring it to Australian standards and have it signed off to be able to get the quotes for the building of your factory and the equipment so that you can get to FID, and, at FID, you can invest the $400-plus million to actually build the facility. We're in that early-stage piece. Do we have offtake agreements? We're going to be a two-plus gigawatt facility. That means that the end user can produce two gigawatts worth of solar panels every single year out of what we produce. So we're the midstream. We are talking to US offtakers, and, yes, we have 50 per cent of that under LOI moving through to an MOU. No offtaker is going to sign a contract pre-FID. They will only sign it when you get to the FID stage. So it's a little bit of a chicken and egg, in that you need to be able to prove that you can sell it at a premium price that makes sense and, commercially, you can make a profit. But, equally, you need to do your fundraising, you need to get to that FID position and you need to be confident. We are pretty confident that we can get the money at FID because we have been canvassing the Australian market, but there's a good likelihood that we cannot raise the FID money in this early stage onshore, and that we need to go to the US or somewhere else to raise this money, because they're more familiar with midstream manufacturing, manufacturing in general and investing at this stage. There's also a push, to be fair, from the US for us to do it in the US. So I think that's the risk of not supporting long-term policy of investing into this pre-FID funding. We recognise that, in the budget, there was a pullback from the Solar SunShot program, which is disappointing for us as an industry because it doesn't give the right messaging to our private investors that this is supported by the government. However, we do believe that there is sufficient funding at FID for concessional debt, for example. We do think there is an opportunity. We notice that there are concessions, I guess, for venture capital investments through the recent budget. But I think there could be more from a policy perspective that gives incentive to smaller investors, family offices or whoever it is investing through a venture capital fund to invest in pre-FID manufacturing or processing. And I think that applies across critical minerals. I know plenty of people in the critical minerals industry who are in the same boat as us, and I think that there are definitely mechanisms that could be put in place that incentivise investment into this part of Australia's economy. Mr CHAFFEY: With Solar Sunshot—with that $1.3 billion now gone from the latest budget, what alternative support mechanism do you feel the Commonwealth should or could provide for the industry? Mrs Hurll : To answer the first part of that question, the $1.3 billion was pulled from a number of policies. One of them was the Solar Sunshot program, but it was also the battery headstart and the green hydrogen piece. It's still not completely clear how much has come out of Solar Sunshot, but I would argue that the $1 billion behind Solar Sunshot wasn't enough in reality anyway. If we look at a US system of support of this industry, they have or did have the IRA with production credits. The piece under Solar Sunshot really helped get the solar panel manufacture off the ground but not necessarily our piece of the industry. We were lobbying for more funding to be put behind it to build up this part of the industry. What sort of support do we think needs to be there? I think we need early-stage support to help us get off the ground. At the moment, pre-FID funding is matched funding, and obviously there are issues around the co-funding of that. I think that there needs to be long-ish-terms—to put it into a five- to six-year perspective of production credits—that allow you that support based on the production output that's quantifiable and based on the results of what you produce. I think there needs to be support from that level. What that does is that it allows us to build the facility from scratch through to a 30-year facility. We'll repay that funding. Over the first 10 years, we pretty much repay it through taxes—corporate tax, PAYG, GST and so forth—but, over a 30-year period, I think the returns are about 14 times. So there's a good return on any investment that is made at that early stage. I'm happy to take the question on notice, and we'll come back to you privately with what we think are the right mechanisms on that, because it's quite a specific question. I think there needs to be support to try and get these industries off the ground. It's not just us, necessarily, by ourselves; it's actually about a long-term view on how this industry can be built up over time and how different components of that can be brought in over time. There are lots of different pieces to this puzzle. CHAIR: Ms Ambihaipahar. Ms AMBIHAIPAHAR: Happy Australian Made Week! I think this conversation is quite timely. You refer to the Commonwealth-state solar manufacturing acceleration partnership. Are you able to give some reflections or talk about what that looks like? How would that look in operation? Mrs Hurll : I think that the solar value chain and the building of this industry need to have a long-term outlook. What we're looking at here are the parts of the puzzle that are done at a federal level and the parts that are done at a state level. There are different parts of that support that we were just talking to that can come from a state level as well. For example, we need to be working in conjunction with a solar farm developer and a BESS developer. Having a precinct that has different parts of that value chain co-located will require the different levels of government, federal and state, to be supporting into that precinct. I'm happy to take that on notice as well. I'm probably not as well prepared for that answer. Ms AMBIHAIPAHAR: That's alright. I think it would be good to see what we currently have and do a comparison with how the intention of this partnership will fill a gap. Mrs Hurll : Sure. Ms AMBIHAIPAHAR: Thank you. CHAIR: Mr Burnell. Mr BURNELL: How has Stellar PV partnered with First Nations peoples in its operations? Mrs Hurll : We're developing our facility in the Townsville area, up in Queensland. It's actually quite early stages for us, because we are pre-FID. Our intention is to work with the local consultants who have long-term relationships with the local Bindal people in that area. We will sit with them and come to a conclusion on how we're going to work together in that particular precinct. In that area, the Bindal people are already working with other proponents who are doing similar and like-minded facilities. Our intention is to have early relationships and early conversations and build up good partnerships with them so that they will transpire into opportunities to supply services to our facility, long-term jobs, training and traineeships. We obviously need to train a new workforce because this is an industry that we don't have and a skill set that we don't necessarily have. We'll be working very closely with the TAFEs in the area to build up that skill set. But, from a First Nations perspective, it will be traineeships and that side of the working relationship. We've already got some relationships in that area, but it's a work in progress for us. Mr BURNELL: I'm hoping that you might be able to also go into the proposed Indigenous partnerships contracts and what role government would have in that process. Mrs Hurll : The right answer is probably that I'm not sure I'm the best person to answer that question. Because we're not that far through the process, I'm not well versed in the answer but I believe that, in that area, there is a—actually, I don't know the answer. I'm not going to talk about it because I don't want to say the wrong thing. Mr BURNELL: That's okay. I'm happy for you to take it on notice. CHAIR: Thanks. I'm going to defer to the deputy in a moment, but I'm interested in Townsville—is that because you're mining the silica and quartz there? Mrs Hurll : The quartz is mined within about 200 to 300 kilometres of that area, and there's another proponent who is planning a metallurgical silicon site there and, potentially, a polysilicon site. That would literally come across the road, into our factory, so the main inputs into our factory are polysilicon, power and labour. CHAIR: This is the ecosystem that you're describing? Mrs Hurll : Yes, that's right. CHAIR: It's similar to my experience, which is in aluminium. You have bauxite, which is refined into alumina, which is then used to create aluminium. In this other facility, you're mining the silica and then you're turning it into the metallurgical silicon. Mrs Hurll : Yes, it's the metallurgical silicon and then the polysilicon and then we take it. At the moment, we don't have polysilicon production in Australia, so it's really important to us to be close to a port. It is produced regionally. The supply chain is not Chinese owned, so it's there as a non-FEOC supply chain, so we do have the opportunity to import it while we're waiting for a polysilicon site in Australia, but it comes from Australian quartz and Australian metallurgical silicon. CHAIR: Obviously, it would ideally be better not to import it— Mrs Hurll : Correct. CHAIR: from a cost perspective for you, as well. Mrs Hurll : And for traceability— CHAIR: All the things. Mrs Hurll : All the reasons, yes. CHAIR: Deputy Chair, did you want to pick up a line of questioning? Mr CHAFFEY: Yes, probably to dive a little bit more into this. It's an area I know very little about—to be competitive in this world market and to be a trusted supplier of the ingot wafer to other countries that might want to withdraw from the existing country that they're currently buying supply from. Your facility that you're talking about is two gigawatt. How scalable is that? How could it be increased in the country to be that trusted supplier of export quantity? I assume that there would need to be much bigger quantities if we're going to be relied on by other nations. Also, I'm not sure whether I was comprehending that timeframe piece or not. That was an earlier question about just how critical this is if we are to trying to develop, get into that market and be that reliable, trusted, affordable partner for other nations. Can you try and be a little bit precise about the window we have for that? Mrs Hurll : On the window piece, what we're seeing in the US at the moment is that there are two ingot and wafering facilities coming online. One came online last year and one's coming online this year. It's only nine gigawatt. On the cell piece, we're seeing increased activity and development of solar wafer manufacturing and some movement on where that supply chain is coming from. Very specifically, in the US, there's Section 232. There has been a study done on Section 232 that is about the supply chain of polysilicon and its derivatives. There's been a lot of lobbying in the US around where that supply chain is coming from and at what point it is critically important. If you look at the existing policy settings in the US, there is a clear line of sight for modules and cell manufacture, but it does not necessarily go down to the wafers, per se. What will happen with this particular piece of legislation—we are expecting there to be an announcement on this in June or July. It's been coming for a while. Once that is announced—touch wood; let's see what the goalposts look like when it is announced, because we don't know all the details yet—it will be clear that they will be looking for a supply chain, and it will be financially viable because of the policy settings that are in place in the US. They will be looking for that non-FEOC supply chain of ingots and wafers in particular. Whether or not that extends to polysilicon and the source of polysilicon, it may be that Chinese polysilicon can still come into it, and it may be that we need Australian polysilicon. What that means is that, as these new facilities are built—and a number of new facilities have been announced and are building five-gigawatt, six-gigawatt facilities, and multiples of these, in the US—they're going to be looking for that new supply chain coming from, for example, Australia. Our particular facility is a two-to-three-gigawatt facility. It feels small; it's big by Australian standards. We've got hundreds of Czochralski pullers in this facility. It's going to be automated and it's going to be fabulous, but it is also scalable. In particular, it's the pulling facility that would need to be replicated to double the size; the wafering facility has the ability to take more capacity in its current footprint. The footprint of the pulling facility is somewhere from two to three gigawatts as it currently stands, and we would need to build an adjacent facility to double that capacity. But, in the early stages, we need to be able to prove that we can build this, that we can sell the offtake and that it makes sense—then we move forward to the next piece. From a timing perspective it's really important that we align our production in 2029 with the US production of cell capacity. That's really important, because that's when they need it. We need to be really clear that we can actually achieve that. CHAIR: Thank you so much for your attendance here today. It has been really valuable. You've offered some additional information, and the secretariat will be in touch with you in terms of timing for that. You'll be sent a copy of the transcript of your evidence, and you'll have the opportunity to request corrections to transcription errors. Thank you so much for coming along to give evidence today. It's much appreciated. Proceedings suspended from 11:16 to 13:01 .