Markets & Policy

The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission has issued a call for homeowners to urgently check their residential energy storage systems amid a national recall of some LG-branded batteries which may overheat and ignite.

Australia’s rooftop solar industry has undergone a significant change with a new national standard that removes the requirement for rooftop PV installations to include a DC isolator now in effect.

A $150 million loan scheme introduced by the Australian Capital Territory government has sparked an uptake of rooftop solar in Canberra with more than 20MW of new solar PV rolled out across roofs in the nation’s capital.

Scientists in the United Arab Emirates have looked at how off-grid rooftop PV could be combined with batteries, fuel cells or reversible solid oxide cells for energy storage. The modelling assumed a typical commercial building in Los Angeles.

The Northern Territory government has doubled down on its support for the world’s biggest solar PV and storage project with parliament passing legislation that will facilitate the $30 billion-plus Sun Cable Australia-Asia PowerLink project which is expected to transform the region into a green industrial hub and establish a new energy export industry for Australia.

The switch has been flicked on what has been labelled one of the Southern Hemisphere’s largest rooftop solar PV systems with Queensland government-owned Yurika announcing an almost 5MW system installed atop the Logan Hyperdome Shopping Centre is now operational.

Two new solar farms in regional New South Wales are now delivering clean energy to the National Electricity Market with e-commerce giant Amazon announcing its first Australian utility-scale renewable energy investments and are now operational.

Reclaim PV Recycling and the Circular PV Alliance (CPVA) have announced a partnership which will see the pair work together to develop standards and testing procedures to support the reuse and resale of solar panels in Australia. The union comes after Reclaim PV found more than 31% it collected in a Queensland region could be considered for reuse rather than recycling.

New Zealand’s government this week unveiled its plan to cut emissions and fund the clean energy transition, featuring policies like a ‘scrap and replace’ scheme to incentivise electric vehicles and funding for electrifying industry. The NZ$2.9 billion (AU$2.6 billion) plan has received mixed reviews, with Greenpeace saying it has overlooked the country’s most glaring problem.

ACE Green Recycling has announced plans to build a new plant in Texas to recycle both lead-acid and lithium-ion batteries.