Australian property investor and developer Cbus Property has revealed plans to clad a $1 billion commercial office tower being developed in Melbourne’s CBD with a ‘solar skin’ capable of generating 20% of the project’s base building electricity requirements.

Fotowatio Renewable Ventures’ Australian platform has shifted its attentions to across the ditch, teaming with one of New Zealand’s largest energy providers in a joint venture which will develop up to 500 MW of solar PV capacity over the next five years.

The companies that own and operate the Basslink undersea power cable linking Tasmania and Victoria have entered voluntary administration amid a legal dispute with the Tasmania government over an outage that occurred six years ago.

Western Australian miner IGO is building upon its renewable energy options at its Nova nickel operation after signing an agreement with Perth-based energy storage company VSUN Energy to trial a hybrid standalone power system backed by a vanadium redox flow battery.

Australia’s first coordinated renewable energy zone is to be built in the New South Wales central west with the state government revealing the Central-West Orana REZ, which will deliver at least 3 GW of renewable energy into the grid, has been formally declared.

Federal government plans to expand the mandate of the Clean Energy Finance Corporation so it can invest in carbon capture and storage technology have been criticised as “yet another attempt to prop up Australia’s thermal coal industry, at the expense of renewables”.

The first week of the United Nations climate talks in Glasgow are drawing to a close. While there’s still a way to go, progress so far gives some hope the Paris climate agreement struck six years ago is working.

The Australian Government has set a goal of producing solar electricity for a third of today’s costs, declaring that “ultra low-cost solar” will be critical to achieving its long-term emissions reduction plan.

Australian energy storage company Redback Technologies has unveiled an expanded product range, adding a series of grid-tied solar inverters and new beefed-up battery products to its existing line of modular battery energy storage systems for residential and commercial customers.

Dutch renewables company Photon Energy has announced it will build “the world’s largest” solar-plus-storage project to date, teaming with Australian technology provider and project developer RayGen Resources to develop a facility that will deliver 300 MW of solar generation and 3.6 GWh of energy storage.