Why Israel wants in on Australia’s energy boom

South Australia spent the last afternoon of winter running almost entirely on sunlight.

On August 31, rooftop solar alone met 99.9 per cent of the state’s electricity demand, according to the Australian Energy Market Operator, grid-scale generation was needed for just two megawatts, an afterthought beside the output pouring off suburban roofs.

It’s the kind of record cited as proof Australia’s energy transition to green power is working.

But it is also, in AEMO’s own words, a management headache: “High renewable generation increasingly being balanced in real time by batteries, hydro and gas, supported by the transmission network.”

That gap – abundant power, immature capacity to move and secure it – is exactly where Israel’s energy tech sector has started pitching itself as a partner rather than a spectator.

The case was laid out in June by Lachlan Corne, energy trade officer at the Israel Trade and Economic Commission in Sydney, in a paper titled “A Harmony of Abundance and Scarcity.”

Israel, he argued, has built an outsized surplus of exactly what Australia is short on: algorithmic intelligence, grid software and cybersecurity, drawn from a sector now numbering 369 active companies, up 68 per cent over the past decade, with $1.7 billion in exits.

Australia has the reverse issue, with abundant sun, wind and remote land, but a grid straining to digitise fast enough to manage what it is generating.

Corne identifies three specific openings.

The first is AI-driven grid management, with predictive software to smooth the strain rooftop solar puts on the National Electricity Market, in the vein of work done by Israeli firms like mPrest and Prisma Photonics on grid monitoring.

The second is cybersecurity – protecting an increasingly digitised grid from the state-sponsored attacks Corne names as a live threat, the speciality of firms such as Claroty and SaiFlow.

The third is decentralised power: long-duration storage, hydrogen and carbon capture aimed at Australia’s remote mining and agricultural operations, a market Israeli firms including Brenmiller Energy, Phinergy and H2Pro are built to serve.

The scale of that third opportunity is easy to see on the ground.

Fortescue broke ground in May on what it calls the world’s largest off-grid renewable network for heavy industry with 1.2 gigawatts of solar, 600-plus megawatts of wind and up to 5 gigawatts of battery storage across its Pilbara iron ore operations, run as an islanded system disconnected from the national grid entirely.

An issue is that the hardware going into it is Chinese, not Israeli.

Chinese firms supply most of Australia’s solar inverters and batteries too. Officials have spent years warning that these internet-connected devices could be remotely manipulated under Beijing’s intelligence laws to trigger blackouts at scale; a concern serious enough that new federal cybersecurity rules covering home batteries and smart inverters only took effect in March.

Corne told The AJN the commission is in active discussions with large mining companies in Australia to showcase these Israel technologies.

“Australia is rich in energy sources, yet significant opportunity remains in how they are extracted, managed and processed. I believe energy Israeli technologies could be the key to closing these gaps.”

Australia has the sun, the wind and the remote real estate; Israel says it has the code to run it. All that’s missing is for some companies to connect these dots.