Manufacturing

The way has been smoothed for Australian mining company Sunrise Energy Metals to take advantage of the booming lithium-ion battery industry with the federal government awarding Major Project Status to a $2.4 billion nickel and cobalt mine being developed in New South Wales.

The Chinese manufacturer appears to have shouldered higher input costs in return for carving out a larger slice of the world’s biggest solar market – although it’s not clear from the company’s third-quarter update that CEO Xiande Li received the memo.

German company sonnen, a wholly owned subsidiary of Shell, today launched a new residential battery storage system specifically developed for Australia and New Zealand. Chief Commercial Officer of sonnenGroup and Managing Director of sonnen Australia, Nathan Dunn, told pv magazine Australia its sonnenBatterie Evo is the culmination of a new approach and may go on to inform how its future products for global markets are developed.

A French research group has compared the performance ratio of 100 PV systems relying on micro-inverters with that of 100 installations relying on string/central inverters. It found the performance ratio is around 79% for both system typologies and that arrays with micro-inverters are more sensitive to environmental factors.

AGL has “broken ground” at Torrens Island power station in preparation for the construction of its 250 MW/250 MWh battery which has drawn interest for being the largest planned grid-forming battery in the world.

Scientists in the United States pieced together data from hundreds of different sources, looking to establish the key factors that have led to consistently falling prices for lithium-ion technology since their commercialisation thirty years ago. They find that public-funded research, primarily in chemistry and materials science, has made the largest contribution to cost reduction. And they offer suggestions on policy and investment to ensure that the research can continue to make these important contributions to reduction in battery costs.

Independent battery performance and reliability tester ITP Renewables has been running its trial of solar storage batteries since 2016. Over the years one of the broad conclusions to be drawn is that home storage systems are by no means reliable across the board. However, some few systems stand out, including Fimer’s hybrid solar inverter and storage solution, the React 2.

As Australia, like much of the world, battles shortfalls in supply with solar module prices rising and Chinese companies’ stocks decreasing, the country’s only manufacturer, Tindo Solar, has opted to release emergency stocks. Likewise, Chinese giant Longi is working to guarantee supply for Australia, saying its vertical integration has afforded it extra security.

Queensland continues to attract massive hydrogen industry factories, with LAVO Hydrogen Technology today announcing it would establish a fuel cell manufacturing facility just south of Brisbane.

The Queensland government will put “at least” $10 million towards constructing a common-user facility to process vanadium from the state’s vast deposits, allowing multiple small mining operations to access the facility with the ambition of kickstarting downstream battery storage industries in the state.