E&OE

ANGUS TAYLOR: Glad to be here with you Sean and Darren, great to see you again. And it's a real pleasure, to have the opportunity to come here to this site, and I know there's an enormous amount of work that's gone on here in re-commissioning it for the purpose that we're going to talk about today amongst other things. So, it's wonderful to be here and great to see Darren and the good work that I know ARENA continues to do, which this is one of many projects.

The announcement today, of course, is that the Australian Government through ARENA has provided $3.1 million for this Eco Park. ARENA was established to improve the competitiveness of renewable energy in Australia and to solve some of those really hard R&D problems that we have to solve to make use of renewable energy in this country into the future. And of course, that is something close to my heart. I've been a huge believer in the power of technology for many, many years. I'm also a believer at getting technology to work well-paced time. It's not easy. Crossing the chasm is a difficult task and it requires partnerships between commercial entities, government agencies, scientists in academia, and others in order to make that work. And it's fantastic to see the work that ARENA does, and I know Toyota is doing in crossing that chasm, in taking R&D which works in one environment but might not work in another and getting it out into the real world and making it work in real world and scaling it, which of course is one of the great challenges of getting technology to work in practice.

Of course, as I look at the electricity sector and the energy sector, one of the biggest challenges we face is in storage and transport and it is becoming more and more important because renewable energy, by its very nature, is intermittent - very often, not always, but very often and very often requires transport. The place where it is best to capture it isn't necessarily the place where it's best to be used and that storage and transport can be solved by hydro. It's not the only means but it's an important means that we are very interested in and that's why the energy ministers of each state and territory have agreed to set up guiding principles to develop a comprehensive strategy, a national hydrogen strategy. And we've established a working group headed by the Chief Scientist to develop a strategy during the course of this year. We do think that hydrogen can present a very important opportunity for Australia. Obviously, there's a real opportunity for the world to solve this problem that I've described but it is also an opportunity for Australia. We have been a very effective supplier of energy into the world for many, many years, for many, many years and I think we can continue to, as technologies change and adapt, and hydrogen has the potential to be a crucial part of that.

The storage part of hydrogen, of course, is one that is often not well understood and of course, as an investor in Snowy Hydro, an owner of Snowy Hydro and more recently, a 1.4 billion investor in Snowy 2.0 - we understand, I think, very deeply the importance of storage and the need to have more storage in our electricity system, in our electricity grid, as hydrogen can play a very important role in that. And I know ARENA has been doing an enormous amount of work on thinking about firming and storage in recent years. Consultations are now open for the national hydrogen strategy so I encourage all those out there with views on this, who are doing work in this area, to make submissions and they'll be open until 25 March 2019. Our commitment to working on this national hydrogen strategy recognises that we need to work not just across jurisdictions, which we are doing in this work, across states, territories and the federal government, but also across commercial entities, industry, and the community.

Can I congratulate again Toyota on the work you're doing, ARENA on the work that you're doing? Thank you very much again for having me here today.