Utility Scale Storage

Australia’s solar uptake is now forecast to reach 8.9 GW by 2025, on top of the 14 GW already installed, according to the Australian Electricity Market Operator.

Genex Power’s latest annual report makes inspiring reading, with its plans for repurposing of the Kidston Gold Mine into a renewable energy hub progressing through stages. Its Jemalong solar farm is also delivering to plan — what then of the write down?

Lithium-ion batteries remain the front-runner to power EVs, but without clearer recycling plans from the European Union and the United States, the balance isn’t yet tipped away from heavy mining of new materials to focus on supplying industry needs, writes Ian Morse.

Energy Vault secured US$100 million (AU$137 million) in Series C funding for its EVx tower, which stores gravitational potential energy for grid dispatch.

The world’s biggest solar PV and storage project is set to get even larger with the Singapore-based Sun Cable announcing it plans to increase the renewable energy generation and storage capacity of the $26 billion Australia-ASEAN Power Link being developed in northern Australia.

The battery was built with a new catholyte and a symmetry-breaking strategy, which consists of changing the symmetry of the redox-active organic molecules instead of using the common approach of attaching a hydrophilic functional group.

Lithium-based energy storage volumes in the U.S. are expected to grow by multiple orders of magnitude in the coming years, with a 1000% capacity increase by 2023.

The risks posed to renewable-energy projects by Australia’s uncertain climate change policies and hamstrung regulators, have become a concerning brake on investment. Adjusting settings to reduce those risks would revitalise investor sentiment and vastly reduce the cost of implementing the country’s switch to renewables, says the Clean Energy Investor Group.

Imperatives meet opportunity. Corporate and utility goals for sustainability are driving a new group of investors to pick up the Australian renewable-energy resource and run with it. A new PwC report outlines how the new investor-developer partnerships could work.

China’s efforts to shift electricity generation from a coal-dominated system to a greener mix of renewables is not only centred on wind, solar and other technologies – the country is also rapidly pursuing energy storage. Vincent Shaw reports from Shanghai.