Insurance

We are living through uncertain times. Despite the urgency of the energy transition and the substantial and growing opportunities for new utility-scale (and larger) renewables developments, risks arise for owners, developers, lenders, investors and contractors.

Quality assurance and testing of solar farms is vital worldwide, but particularly in Australia where projects tend to be bigger and the climate more severe. Hugo Silva, Global Sales Manager at Enertis Applus+, takes a look at the different stages of testing and why they are an investment that will yield returns.

Insurance premiums for renewable energy projects are likely to increase again this year, as a joint report from insurance specialists finds the sector continues to underperform from an insurance perspective.

Foresight Solar Fund’s 2020 annual report puts the travails endured and fixes deployed for four now powerful Australian assets in context.

PV modules are being sold with ever longer warranties, but when modules underperform or fail, making claims on those warranties is rarely straightforward. So are the warranties worth the paper they’re written on? Where does this leave installers? And how can this liability be mitigated?

A New Safe and Reliable Energy Storage and Conversion Technologies Research Hub is one of five grant recipients of the Australian Research Council’s funding for Industrial Transformation. The Hub will seek to develop new technologies in energy storage to eliminate the risk of fire, as well as addressing the environmental impact of current technologies. 

In what analysts worldwide are sure to look back on as the last golden period for global solar – at least for the immediate future – China saw more impressive figures for PV manufacturing in the first half of the year. Then the government stepped in.