Australian-made grid technology makes first export to Portugal
Australian company EcoJoule Energy has announced the completion of the first export of its EcoVAR low-voltage distribution STATCOM to Portugal, opening a new European market for the company.
The 40 kVAR three-phase units were built at the company’s Brisbane facility and dispatched this month. With the sale, EcoVAR technology is now in service across four continents — Oceania, Asia, the Middle East and Europe.
The export milestone follows a $15 million capital raise EcoJoule completed in 2025, led by Ellerston Capital and Fifth Estate Asset Management, and including a $3 million commitment from the Clean Energy Finance Corporation (CEFC) through its Powering Australia Technology Fund. The investment has supported EcoJoule to build manufacturing capacity, inventory and its commercial team, the foundations for meeting demand at home and, increasingly, overseas.
“We backed EcoJoule through the Powering Australia Technology Fund to help a market-leading Australian technology company scale up and get its grid solutions to more customers,” said Malcolm Thornton, Head of Growth Capital, CEFC. “Seeing that technology now exported to Europe shows Australian clean energy innovation competing on the world stage, and at the same time helps networks here at home and abroad integrate more renewable energy.”
The EcoVAR is a low-voltage distribution STATCOM (static compensator). It supplies dynamic reactive power, balances load across phases and filters harmonics directly on the distribution network. It can be installed without a network outage, and helps distributors hold voltage within limits and connect more rooftop solar to existing feeders, deferring or avoiding conventional network augmentation.
“I started EcoJoule after seeing, at a utility, how quickly rising solar exports push voltage outside limits on the low-voltage network,” said Dr Mike Wishart, Founder, EcoJoule Energy. “The EcoVAR was designed to correct that at the point where it occurs, without taking customers off supply. The CEFC backing has helped us take that technology from Australia to the world.”
“Portugal is the newest market to adopt the EcoVAR, and it shows technology designed and built in Australia is competitive globally,” said Martin van der Linde, Chief Commercial Officer, EcoJoule Energy. “With CEFC’s support behind our scale-up, our task is to keep making it straightforward for networks anywhere to access it.”
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