Distributed Storage

Housing developers around Australia are catching on to the allure of incorporating solar in buildings from the get go. This weekend the Queensland Government announced plans for two new state-sponsored solar-powered residential developments to light the way for more private companies to install rooftop PV and batteries as a matter of course.

Two outages at coal fired power generators in Victoria last weekend failed to faze the energy market as strong solar uptake ensured wholesale prices actually fell into the negative despite major units going offline at the height of summer.

The Hills International College and Golf Academy in Jimboomba, Queensland (QLD), which boasts former World Number 1 Jason Day as an alumnus, is partnering with Sydney-based renewable energy outfit Energy Estate to develop the Jimboomba Renewable Hydrogen Plant. 

After a rocky start the Victorian Labor Government’s ambitious Solar Homes program gets the rebate recipe right and celebrates a major milestone in the push to have 50% renewable energy in its grid by 2030.

Vanadium flow battery specialist VSUN Energy is pushing ahead with plans to develop a Vanadium Redox Flow Battery (VRFB) for the Australian residential market.

Redflow CEO, Tim Harris, is confident the company’s Gen3 flow battery will go into production in the first half of this year, once the results from its customer trial are evaluated.

As Christmas lights twinkled their last, South Australia’s electricity grid spent a whole day basking in sunshine and turning towards brisk summer breezes. Renewables ruled — a taste of future feasting on clean energy.

A vanadium redox flow battery will be installed at a Western Australian caravan park in the new year. Supplied by VSun Energy, the installation is advances their parent company’s vanadium endeavours.

The strategy includes accelerating the transition of technologies from the lab to the marketplace, focusing on ways to manufacture technologies at scale in the United States and ensuring secure supply chains to enable domestic manufacturing.

Soon 2020 will only be a worry to future high-school history students. But when they ask us if anything good at all happened in 2020, remember this review and tell them that solar PV shone in the darkness. Despite the mess of it all, 2020 has been another good year for Australian solar. The industry has demonstrated resilience, and significant progress has been made in the fields of energy storage, green hydrogen and others.