February 2022

Spanish renewable energy company Acciona is using a robot dog, instead of drones, to monitor a solar park in northern Chile. The device has a built-in thermal vision system that generates thermographic reports on the status of the different PV plant components, as it walks between the panel rows following a programmed route.

A pair of researchers from the University of California San Diego have proposed to precompute certain data when the grid is flooded with solar or wind power, and then store it on servers for later use.

The company behind bill management platform 1bill on Monday announced it will invest more than $2 million in the energy software company Accurassi. The investment will see Accurassi build a platform for energy retailers to accelerate the transition to green energy.

After the deluge of announcements last year, 2022 will see the trickle of big batteries actually operating in Australia turn to a flood. According to Rystad Energy, the country’s battery capacity is set to double before the year is out.

As Australia’s federal election looms, the Clean Energy Council has released a set of nine policy suggestions to realise not only Australia’s decarbonisation, but its potential as a clean energy superpower. The suggestions range from electrifying everything, allocating $1 billion to transition coal communities, and setting hydrogen blending targets for gas networks.

Researchers from Finland and Sweden have reviewed different ways to store compressed gaseous hydrogen, including storage vessels, geological storage, and other underground options.

Standalone power systems utilising solar PV and battery technology continue to gain traction in the Australian market with New South Wales Government-owned network service provider Essential Energy announcing it will seek input from customers living at the “edge of the grid” as it seeks to expand its roll out of the off-grid technology.

Thai-owned Ratch Australia has revealed plans to develop a 70 MW solar PV and large-scale battery energy storage project in the heart of Victoria’s coal country after receiving planning approval from the state government for the $105 million Morwell Solar Farm.

Renewable energy investors’ appetite for large-scale development in Australia appears far from sated with the New South Wales Government revealing almost 50 new solar PV, wind and energy storage projects, totalling more than 34 GW, have been proposed for the South-West Renewable Energy Zone.

Conceived by scientists in China, the device combines an integrated carbon-based perovskite solar cell module with a rechargeable aqueous zinc metal cell. The proposed system achieved an overall efficiency of 6.4%, and a steady operation for more than 200 cycles with little performance degradation.