Climate Ready: First round offers are out

The Minister for Innovation, Industry, Science and Resources has announced the first round of recipients for Climate Ready, the government's four year, $75m grant funding program for technologies to achieve climate change. The list of recipients is available here (pdf).

It's interesting to observe that this round has provided $27.7m of grant funds. That means that the first round has consumed over one third of the available funding for the program, a level of funding that is probably unsustainable unless there is an announcement of significant further investment as part of the economic stimulus, budget or Cutler Review/Venturous Australia response.

This may actually happen, as commentators on the automotive grants Clean Car Innovation Fund are already recommending that the non-motor vehicle producers may be better off if the $400m is reallocated to Climate Ready and invested in these projects, if only because grants are dollar for dollar rather than 1:4.

Also, my speculation that the likelihood of getting a $5m grant was low was wrong, as one project received the maximum amount of $5m (Hofmann Engineering), and another two received over $2m.

Another round of projects closed in December, and we would expect announcements on those projects over the next month or two.