Commercial & Industrial PV

Australian gold miner Bellevue Gold has entered an agreement with distributed energy provider Energy Developments Pty Ltd for an off-grid solar, wind, and battery hybrid power station for the flagship project it is developing in central Western Australia.

The operators of an energy-intensive cryptocurrency mining centre in the South Australian industrial city of Whyalla believe it offers a solution to curtailment issues that haunt many developers of solar PV projects in the National Electricity Market.

With Australia’s appetite for solar energy fuelling a projected surge in end-of-life solar panels, the Victorian government has launched a $10 million program to help deal with the more than 180,000 tonnes of PV panels expected to enter the state’s waste stream by 2035.

Australian energy regulators have called for urgent investments in renewable energy capacity and the transmission infrastructure needed to connect new projects to the grid as they look to ensure an orderly transition as coal-fired generation exits the National Electricity Market.

A new $8 million large-scale, network-connected battery at Tanby on Queensland’s Capricorn Coast is expected to help facilitate the continued integration of renewables, including rooftop solar PV, into the state’s energy system.

South Australia resources company Oz Minerals has given the green light to a $1.7 billion copper and nickel project in Western Australia that is to be powered by a mix of solar PV and wind generation which the miner believes will become one of the largest, off-grid hybrid projects in the world.

Renewable energy investment fund Solar Bay and logistic company Logos have commenced construction of Australia’s largest roof-mounted solar PV system, airlifting in the first of more than 120,000 solar panels that will be installed atop an 800,000sqm industrial warehousing facility in south-western Sydney.

Victoria’s ongoing transition to renewable energy sources, including the installation of hundreds of thousands of rooftop solar PV systems, has helped the state “smash” its 2020 emission reduction targets on the path to net zero by 2050.

A new report published by the International Energy Agency shows solar PV provided employment for approximately 3.4 million people in 2021 with almost half of the workers employed in China, about 280,000 in North America, over 260,000 in Europe, and some 50,000 in Africa. The vast majority of workers were employed in manufacturing and installation of new capacity, with solar jobs paying lower wage premiums than the nuclear, oil, and gas industries.

Electricity supplier AGL Energy will deploy a solar-powered microgrid featuring 5.4 MWh of battery energy storage on a commercial orchard in the New South Wales Riverina region in a bid to reduce the horticultural operation’s reliance on diesel-fuelled generators.