Markets

Two of Australia’s most prominent energy players, AGL Energy and Fortescue Future Industries, today announced plans to repurpose infrastructure at AGL’s Hunter Valley coal stations to turn them into green hydrogen hubs.

Floating PV is a growing niche in the solar sector, but its offshore segment has proven more difficult to activate, largely because of the difficulty of open-water energy generation. Nevertheless, the potential of offshore floating PV is almost unlimited, and one Singaporean firm, G8 Subsea, is looking to leave the safety of harbours and reservoirs.

Italian energy utility giant Enel Group has been granted a retail energy licence for Australia, with the company saying it will soon be one stop shop ‘greentailer’. Supported by its established Australian operations Enel X and Enel Green Power Australia, the new green energy retailer will first target commercial and industrial customers before expanding to residential customers.

Batteries in South Australia have been paid to charge throughout September and October 2021 due to a record number of negative price intervals. Wholesale electricity prices were negative almost 40% of the time.

The Paris-based body expects the world will have installed almost 160 GW of solar this year, a record number, but still not enough to keep the prospect of a net zero global economy by mid century in sight.

Solar manufacturer Jolywood, which supplied almost 500 MW of its bifacial tunnel oxide passivated contact panels for Oman’s Ibri II facility, has claimed the power plant is the biggest to date to deploy the high-efficiency technology.

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.

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.

The new plan would require the deployment of around 15 GW of new PV capacity each year to 2030. The agreement also includes the gradual phasing out of all coal power plants by the end of the decade.