Utility Scale PV

Yesterday I received a call from the people at pv magazine who were preparing for the ‘Virtual Roundtables Europe 2020’ event on this week in Germany – i.e. Tuesday evening (now!) and Wednesday evening ‘NEM time’. I’m told the event will be recorded, with the recording available later to those who have registered, so get your skates on if interested.

One of Australia’s first utility-scale PV projects, the 53 MW Broken Hill Solar Farm in New South Wales, has emerged as a top solar performer in the National Electricity Market in May.

The 9.4MW Robinvale Solar Farm is Suntech’s first 100% owned project in the Australian pipeline to come to fruition and the first solar project in Australia to deploy WePower’s blockchain-based PPA architecture, which opens up opportunities for smaller corporate customers to go green with their procurement strategy.

A new report from the Clean Energy Regulator (CER) shows that the renewable energy sector in Australia has exhibited resilience with 1.3 GW of new installed capacity despite the economic challenges of the Covid-19 pandemic. While rooftop PV continued to thrive in the first three months of this year, the construction of large-scale projects was generally on track with minimal delays.

The levelized cost of energy generated by large scale solar plants is around $0.068/kWh, compared to $0.378 ten years ago and the price fell 13.1% between 2018 and last year alone, according to figures released by the International Renewable Energy Agency.

Solar plants are now expected to last 32.5 years and have operational costs of $17 per kW/year, as shown by a Berkeley Lab survey of industry participants.

Covid-19 crisis has provided system operators with insights on keeping the grid stable with high levels of renewable penetration. Post Covid-19, this may be the new norm, Gautam Adani said in a LinkedIn post recently.

The continuing dominance of the small-scale solar sector and the great potential for regional and rural jobs are just some of the findings in the Clean Energy Council’s “Clean Energy At Work”, a first-of-its-kind extensive report into the current renewable energy workforce and its potential over the next 10-15 years.

An additional $2.9 million from the Australian Government’s Outer Islands Renewable Energy Project (OIREP) is making its way across the sea to the kingdom of Tonga in the form of solar power plants and energy storage. The project is helping Tonga to achieve its target of generating 50% of its electricity from renewable sources by 2020 and 70% by 2030. 

The International Energy Agency has acknowledged dramatic falls in energy investment caused by the Covid-19 crisis but said renewables, including PV, offered an attractive proposition to investors as the dust settled, given their enticing economics and short turnaround times.