Installations

Financiers and investors have always understood that PV power plants play a more prominent role than just generating profits – they also produce electricity without emitting carbon. Lately, the sector is discovering that PV can fulfill a much larger range of environmental functions – improving biodiversity, removing carbon from enriched soils, and producing food in an environmentally sustainable way. Everoze Partner Ragna Schmidt-Haupt argues that putting ecological sustainability at the heart of PV project planning and operation should become the new standard.

Australian gold producer Red 5 is the latest mining company making the switch to renewables, engaging remote power generation specialist Zenith Energy to install a 30 MW hybrid solar PV-gas power plant at its King of the Hills gold mine in Western Australia.

The $2 trillion package includes a proposed 10-year extension of the ITC and PTC and calls for further incentives to add transmission capacity. Most solar advocates liked it, but one nonprofit panned it as being too industry-friendly.

The move is part of the U.S. technology company’s 2030 plan to rely 100% on renewable energy.

A new research project being led by the University of New South Wales will investigate how rooftop solar PV and other distributed energy resources (DER), including small-scale batteries can be best integrated into Australia’s power grid.

Green energy fund CEP.Energy has unveiled plans to construct Australia’s largest rooftop solar farm and a new grid-scale battery on the outskirts of Adelaide as part of its ambition to build 1.5 GW of solar and 2 GW of big battery capacity around Australia.

Sun Cable continues to progress plans for the world’s biggest solar+storage project, lodging a development application for the first phase of a solar module manufacturing and assembly facility to be constructed in Darwin.

An independent exhibition brought to Melbourne Design Week by a group of 15 of the city’s top architectural firms demonstrates the blueprint for Melbourne’s transformation to “A New Normal”. “A New Normal” is a plan to transform Greater Melbourne into a self-sufficient city by 2030.

Iconic Australian beer Victoria Bitter has partnered with Diamond Energy and Power Ledger to develop Solar Exchange, a blockchain-enabled platform that allows residential PV owners to exchange their excess solar for cases of beer. This is not an April Fool’s prank, miracles do happen, stay calm and exchange your excess solar for slabs!

A 1.2 MWp installation featuring more than 4,500 solar panels has sheltered a berry crop from high temperatures and damp to strengthen the claims made by agrivoltaics companies that their systems can offer climate change mitigation as well as clean energy.