Energy Management Systems

The federal government has allocated $25.6 million to support 20 microgrid feasibility studies, including in communities affected by the Black Summer bushfires, which left regions without power for weeks.

The City of Melbourne is planning a network of co-ordinated community batteries to be installed at council sites across the city, aiming for a potential capacity of 5 MW by 2024.

Transmission network operator TransGrid has confirmed works on two high priority electricity infrastructure projects which will allow for more renewable energy to be connected to the National Electricity Market have reached major milestones.

Sax Power has developed a new residential battery which it describes as a game-changer in the battery technology.

A gigafactory, as the name indicates, is a facility that aims to produce Li-ion cells at a gigawatt-hours scale of total capacity, so they can then be used in electric vehicles or stationary storage applications. The global production capacity of Li-ion cells is expected to reach 740 GWh by the end of 2021 – almost a threefold increase from 2017 – and Europe will account for 8% of the total. João Coelho, an analyst at Delta-EE, looks at how Europe plans to catch up.

The evolution of Australia’s electricity grid continues at pace with the nation’s newest large-scale wind and solar projects helping produce a string of renewable energy production records in the National Electricity Market.

In his first public address, the newly appointed head of the Australian Energy Market Operator significantly upped the Operator’s ambitions for renewable penetrations in the grid, conveying the importance of no longer constraining what he called ‘zero cost’ renewable energy assets.

SA Water, one of the largest water utilities in Australia and most ambitious when it comes to renewable energy, has partnered with aerial solar inspection and data analysis company, Above, to monitor the performance of its 360,000+ solar panels.

The Australian National University today opened its Distributed Energy Resources Lab, dedicated to researching and testing technologies including batteries, solar panels and electric vehicles which it says will “underpin the energy grids of the future”.


A major hurdle confronting large-scale solar and wind projects in Australia has been addressed with the Australian Energy Market Commission fast-tracking a rule change governing how electricity generators connect to the grid.