Utility Scale PV

Australian commercial solar outfit CleanPeak Energy continues to build out its utility-scale PV portfolio, announcing it has achieved financial close on the 40 MWp Wangaratta Solar Farm being developed in northern Victoria.

Construction has started on Western Australia’s second grid-scale battery in Kwinana as the state government looks to scale up energy storage capacity to support its planned transition from coal-fired power to renewables.

Australian miner QEM has shortlisted three non-binding indicative bids to develop, own and operate a proposed 1 GW of wind and solar energy to power its planned vanadium mining and oil shale project near Julia Creek in northwest Queensland.

Australian renewable energy developer Genex Power has entered into agreements with Japanese electric utility J-Power to receive a multi-million-dollar funding package that will support the delivery of its 2 GWh pumped hydro project in northern Queensland and the development of the 2 GW Bulli Creek solar and battery project in the state’s southeast.

French oil and gas supermajor TotalEnergies has signed an agreement with Gentari Renewables, the clean energy arm of Malaysia’s state-owned oil company Petronas, to jointly develop a 100 MW solar farm in southwest Queensland.

Construction of what is shaping to be Tasmania’s first operational commercial-scale renewable hydrogen production facility is to commence in the coming weeks after Line Hydrogen secured development approval for its 7.6 MW George Town green hydrogen project.

Over the next five to 15 years, batteries will undercut the business case for major transmission and interconnector projects. These assets will nonetheless likely be built, decreasing price spreads and eating into the revenues of batteries, solar and storage analyst Warwick Johnston predicts.

BHP is planning to install more than 500 MW additional wind and solar power backed by battery energy storage in Western Australia’s Pilbara region in the next seven years as it looks to slash the use of gas and diesel in its iron ore operations.

Scientists in Europe have put together a comprehensive guide to PV module degradation, examining literature and case studies on the topic as far back as the 1990s. Their paper details the primary stress factors faced by modules in the field, the most common modes of degradation and failure, and provides clear definitions relevant to reliability, quality and testing standards. Among their key findings is that a full understanding of how combinations of different stresses over varying timeframes is still missing from methods to estimate and improve system reliability.

Historic meteorological data is typically used to assess solar farm yield and secure project finance, but with climate change beginning to affect every aspect of society, past weather data may no longer be a reliable guide. Everoze Partner Nastasia Pacaut looks at how PV projects can be future-proofed in a changing climate.