Secretary Antony J. Blinken Following Tour of EV-Charger Company Tritium

SECRETARY BLINKEN:  Well, I hope you enjoyed that as much as Ambassador Kennedy and I did.  It’s really extraordinary.  We have an incredible partnership between the United States and Australia and in so many ways, but one of them is finding ways to support each other in commercializing technology that is essential at the heart of the clean energy transition.  And this is maybe one of the best examples anyone can think of here at Tritium because, as you’ve seen, they make leading-edge, world-class charging stations for electric vehicles.  And as we heard just a short while ago, it’s not only for automobiles – it’s also for ships, for trucks, and other vehicles.

We have the ambition in the United States that President Biden set out to have 500,000 charging stations along our roads in the coming years in order to make sure that we have the infrastructure necessary to support electric vehicles.  Tritium has a factory in Tennessee; they’re employing about 500 people there.  They’ll be making up to 30,000 of these chargers in Tennessee every single year for the goal of having 500,000 chargers across the country.  So that’s a powerful contribution to what we’re trying to do in the United States in building out our grid.

And it also reflects what is now a pillar in our alliance, which is for the clean energy transition. And it’s exactly companies like Tritium and the partnership we have that’s making all the difference.  We have now two-way investment between Australia and the United States of about $1.3 trillion every year.  But just in the last couple of years, the historic legislation that President Biden shepherded through – between the Infrastructure Act, between the Inflation Reduction Act, as well as the CHIPS Act – that has added about $3.5 billion dollars in investments and financing for Australian companies that are at the leading edge of this technology transition.

So it’s all part of the effort to really turbocharge the clean energy transition.  There’s the fierce urgency of now that we all feel.  Just today, I think you heard Secretary-General Guterres of the United Nations saying we’ve moved from global warming to global boiling.  That only emphasizes how important this is, how imperative it is, how urgent it is.  But it all comes down to being able to have the technology to make it work commercially, and Tritium is a wonderful example of that.

Last thing I’ll say is this.  It’s a powerful generator of jobs.  We see that in the employment in the United States in Tennessee; we see it here in Australia.  We know that markets of the future are going to be looking for, asking for, demanding this technology.  And so the countries that are working on it and, in many cases, working on it together to produce it, will also be at the forefront of the 21st-century economy in making sure that there are good, well-paying jobs for all of our people.

We couldn’t be more grateful for the partnership with Australia, and very happy to see this with our own eyes.  You can see for yourselves, and I suspect more and more Americans and Australians will be seeing exactly this in the years to come.