Genex Power, owner of the 50 MW / 100 MWh Bouldercombe battery which caught fire in Queensland on September 26, says its preliminary root cause analysis found the fault occurred at the grid side of the Tesla Megapack battery unit.

The first of 50 pole mounted electric vehicle (EV) chargers have been powered up in Sydney as part of an ARENA project with Intellihub. The project is seeking to provide infrastructure for those locked out of the EV market, as well as understand regulatory and commercial barriers for public EV charging and V2G charging.

Fronius, Australia’s most popular inverter brand, has lost almost 35% of its marketshare this year due to major stock shortages. After a year of supply issues, Fronius Australia’s managing director told pv magazine that its backlog, including for the GEN24 Primo 10, should be cleared by the end of November.

LAVO, which entered the market with its hydrogen battery in 2021, has soft launched a new Energy-as-a-Service model. Partnering with Yingli Solar, LAVO says it can install and maintain solar, battery and EV charging systems at no upfront cost to Australian households, who will then pay off the systems via a 10-year subscription.

Renewable energy investor and developer Quinbrook has launched software to allow customers to trace both the source and carbon-intensity of their electricity in real-time. The energy-tracing platform comes at an important moment, just as Australia’s government is deciding whether to include time-stamped and granular source information in its formal certificate schemes.

One of Australia’s “big four” banks, the Commonwealth Bank, will begin offering interest-free finance up to $30,000 to install rooftop solar and home batteries with select merchants. The program will also allow customers to split repayments into instalments over one to five years.

Australian natural hydrogen explorer Gold Hydrogen says it has confirmed an “active natural hydrogen field” in South Australia with purities nearly matching those accidentally discovered 100 years ago. The results come from Australia’s first dedicated natural hydrogen exploration well.

SunDrive Solar, a Sydney-based startup working to replace the silver in solar cells with copper, has been allocated $11 million (USD 7 million) by ARENA to expand its metallised cell production to a commercial scale of more than 100 MW per annum. Few details or timeframes for the scaling have been provided, however.

The Commonwealth government’s Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA) approved record funds in FY22/23, allocating $544.1 million (USD 345 million) to 60 projects in the year.

The Queensland government has announced $1.3 billion (USD 820 million) package to fund the next stages of its major transmission CopperString 2032 project, targeting construction in mid-2024. The transmission line will connect the critical minerals-rich region of North Queensland to renewable energy projects to hopefully kickstart green processing and manufacturing.