“A tsunami of opportunity is coming for every supply chain we choose to play in.” ~ Heidi Lee, Beyond Zero Emissions CEO
SANDERS Place was at full stretch on Tuesday night as founders, investors, policy leaders and engineers crammed into the award-winning Richmond venue for Innovation Bay’s Renewable Energy Startup Showcase.
Now in its sixth year, the event has become a bellwether for where Australia’s clean-energy innovation is heading and how quickly the country can move from ambition to implementation.
This year’s theme, Road to 100% Renewables, was less about distant targets and more about the practical industrial overhaul already underway. Six carefully selected startups took the stage, each pushing a different lever of the transition: biological fertilisers, mineral processing, energy pricing automation, industrial heat, hydrogen aviation and AI-driven home electrification. Together they painted a picture of an energy system changing not at the edges, but at its foundations.
Yet it was Beyond Zero Emissions CEO Heidi Lee who gave the night its anchor and, ultimately, its challenge. Her keynote was a masterclass in narrative, optimism and grounded analysis, delivered with a designer’s eye for clarity and an engineer’s insistence on the practical.
Postcard 2050: Back To The Future
Before turning to policy and pathways, Lee opened with an unexpected postcard — not from the past, but from 2050.
“Welcome to 2050,” she said, inviting the audience to imagine stepping off a scuba dive on WA’s west coast, gliding over a thriving reef built around offshore wind foundations.
She described a home that balances its own neighbourhood grid, where a heat pump hums quietly after two decades of reliable service, and where the food in the kitchen is grown in soil renewed through biological fertilisers rather than stripped by them.
“If that excites you,” she said, “there’s a reason to visit Factor Energy and see their pitch tonight.”
It was a deft rhetorical manoeuvre, a future that felt plausible because every element of it, she argued, already exists in this room or in progress around the country.
But before leaping ahead, Lee wound back to the present. Beyond Zero Emissions, she reminded the audience, has been mapping this pathway for years.
“In 2010, a fully renewable grid sounded ridiculous,” she said. “But our team of nerds wrote the blueprint. We mapped where the wind and solar would go, calculated the concrete, steel and glass, modelled the factories. We laid out an end-state you could picture.”
That visual approach, she said, is the first step in any design process: sketch the future you want, then work backwards.
Her argument was simple: the technology now exists; the industrial know-how exists; the regions have the assets, the only question is pace.
“The question is not whether we have the tech or capability,” she said. “It’s whether we’re going to move fast enough to make it matter.”
Those comments landed strongly in a room full of founders who are, in many ways, the ones being asked to accelerate that pace.
Startups that fit the narrative
Lee’s future-forward postcard wasn’t abstract. It was constructed deliberately around the very startups pitching later in the evening.
She referenced homes trading power with EVs; the very arena TOTEX Energy seeks to optimise with its AI-driven home energy system. She imagined soil restored through biological inputs (a nod to Algenie’s microalgae-based fertilisers). She described a clean-tech precinct humming with electrified industry (a future made possible by Good Heat’s zero-carbon heat batteries). She pictured a critical-minerals recovery plant pulling value from old tailings (Banksia Minerals Processing’s exact proposition). Factor Energy, an API-first SaaS platform automating complex energy pricing, enabling fast, accurate quotes for retailers and aggregators across diverse energy products. And she nodded to the silent lift-off of a hydrogen aircraft overhead (Stralis Aircraft’s goal as it prepares for a 2026 hydrogen-electric test flight).
If the startups were the individual dots, Lee spent her keynote drawing the connecting lines.
A framework for getting big things done
With the room warmed, she shifted to what Australia needs to do next. Big things, she argued, do not happen through isolated effort; they happen when four conditions align.
First, clean industry and clean energy must be built together. “There’s a standoff,” she said. “Factories won’t electrify until they’re confident in renewable supply. Renewable developers won’t commit until demand is locked in. Doing both at once unlocks possibility.”
Second, Australia must participate in supply chains rather than simply deploy imported hardware. “Every rooftop system, every farm-scale system, every component will eventually be replaced,” she said. “If we meet our climate goals, the volume will be enormous. There will be a tsunami of opportunity. But only if we are playing in each supply chain.”
The think tank’s modelling suggests that Australia does not need to make entire products, but should capture 25 to 35 percent of key supply chains to remain competitive and avoid becoming “a tip on the other side of the greatest industrial revolution of our lifetimes.”
Third, coordination across regions is essential. “The biggest changes will not happen in the cities,” Lee said. “They’ll happen in regions: the engine rooms of the economy.” Infrastructure, industrial precincts, transmission routes and workforce planning all need to be aligned locally and nationally.
And if those three elements line up, she said, the fourth follows logically: the safe retirement of fossil-fuel facilities. “Emissions don’t fall because we efficiency-ed our way there if consumption keeps rising,” she said. “Emissions fall when we turn off fossil fuels.”
It was a reminder that the transition’s end point is not theoretical.
CLEAN POWER, LOWER COSTS: THE REAL IMPACT OF ELECTRIFICATION IN AUSTRALIA
Not a fantasy: a project already underway
Lee’s closing message circled back to her opening story.
The vision of 2050 she described — quieter streets, lower bills, clean industry, community energy systems, hydrogen aircraft, revitalised regions — is not a dream sequence.
“That kind of future is exactly what happens when we get ourselves together, coordinate well and deliver things on time,” she pointed out. “There is absolutely no reason we can’t have confidence that future is ours, because every part of it is in this room.”
Her remarks set the tone for the pitches that followed, each founder slotting neatly into the broader storyline she had laid out.
Although Innovation Bay’s Showcase was my first, I was told by astute followers it has always been about the next wave of climate tech. But this year, with the theme of 100 percent renewables, the night carried a “sharper edge”, one investor commented. The conversations were less about promising prototypes and more about industrial transformation already beginning to surface — in energy markets, in manufacturing, in aviation and in the soil.
The crowd that mingled afterward reflected that shift: investors asking about supply chains, founders comparing deployment hurdles, regional leaders discussing how to move from planning to building.
Lee’s keynote argued that Australia can still shape the future instead of reacting to it. The startups on stage made a case that the shaping has already begun.
Future Now Green News is a forward-thinking media platform dedicated to spotlighting the people, projects, and innovations driving the green & blue economy across Australia, Asia and Pacific region. Our mission is to inform, inspire, and connect changemakers through thought leadership and solutions-focused storytelling in sustainability, clean energy, regenerative tourism, climate action, and future-ready industries.
