The Australian Renewable Energy Agency, also known as ARENA, is the federal government’s response to the lack of infrastructure and investment into the future of electric heavy vehicles in the country.
Since its founding in 2012, it has invested nearly $10 billion across the Australian renewable energy industry, with a direct $2.25 billion in grants funding for projects related to electric trucks and infrastructure.
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It’s not just transport that ARENA focuses on – in 2024 alone it has also provided funding to projects in aviation, mining, consumer energy, food manufacturing, robotics, wastewater, buses and more.
In November it announced that $100 million in funding was available under its ‘Driving the Nation’ program dating back to 2022, which tackles three focus areas in transitioning heavy vehicles in fleets across the nation to electric.
Major operators including Linfox ($19.6 million) and Toll ($9 million) are set to benefit from this investment, but smaller transport businesses have also been reaping the rewards across various sectors of the transport industry.
Now, 2025 is now set to be one of the biggest years for the funding of electric projects through ARENA, and could set the scene for major change in how Australian fleets look.
“We’re going to have $100 million in funding to support other recipients over the next year or year and a half,” says ARENA knowledge sharing manager Adrian Salinas.
“There’s currently about 20 projects in different stages of completion. Some of them have already been announced, with people working and completing milestones.”
Several projects in Western Australia have been completed over the past few years, which Adrian says they are particularly proud of.
Operators Patrick Terminals and Centurion have both previously received funding to transition their fleets and upgrade their infrastructure to support a higher volume of working electric trucks. This funding is removing one of the biggest roadblocks for those interested in moving to electric, being the cost, which has continually been referenced as one of the major challenges in making the switch.
Patrick was awarded $2.5 million in an effort to reduce its emissions at what is WA’s largest container port in Fremantle, which sees a massive volume of both freight and vehicles moving through it.
That money allowed them to deploy nine battery electric terminal trucks and set up fast chargers in a first for the port.
“Patrick takes all these small trucks that move cargo containers in the port, uses them to take the containers from the ship and put them in the trailers themselves,” Adrian says.
“So now all of their operations inside of the port happen with zero emission vehicles. Those are heavy trucks that are moving containers inside of the port.”
The funding for Centurion’s project was another major one, providing them with both a massive addition of electric trucks to their fleet and the infrastructure to go with it.
A grant of $15.8 million from ARENA was put towards 30 battery electric trucks and 15 dual port chargers to not only cut emissions, but increase their capacity to operate their new trucks.
“Centurion’s issue that they had was there’s not enough electricity on the grid to power their trucks,” Adrian says.
“What they did was utilise land that they had next door, and they installed a solar farm to power the trucks. That was a big project for Western Australia.”
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