Markets & Policy

Amid the urgent need to slow climate change by cutting greenhouse gas emissions, energy efficiency makes sense. But as Australia’s chief scientist Alan Finkel last week warned, we’re not “anywhere close to having that nailed”.

U.S.-owned business intelligence firm Wood Mackenzie has attempted to evaluate the market opportunities offered by the repowering of solar projects around the world which feature inverters which are 10 years old – as well as those which will expire ahead of time.

The Minerals Council of Australia has released its long-awaited Climate Action Plan. The plan has been widely criticised for its empty posturing and at least one group of major investors are demanding the Council articulate some of its conspicuously vague plans.

AEMO’s NEM Operations Review of the 2019-2020 Summer finds that mitigation practices helped to prevent what might’ve been a much more difficult summer in terms of the electricity network. However, large-scale and rooftop solar both suffered at the hands of enormous smoke plumes and subsequent forecasting errors.

Scientists in Morocco have designed a new bifacial module with a cooling system, based on bifacial parabolic solar cells that are connected to each other via tubes for panel cooling. They are now patenting the tech, but have yet to manufacture an initial prototype.

Seaside sunshine is a hallmark of the Western Australian regional city of Busselton. Now a number of residents will be able to access a community battery to better manage their solar generation for use during the starry nights.

Tritium today provided some plain and simple stats on how electric-vehicle drivers around the world are using its fast-chargers. Get a glimpse of your future life, beyond an EV-policy-poor Australia, when cars don’t exhaust and finding a charging station is effortless.

In the wake of Covid-19 it is more important than ever to accelerate Australia’s energy transition. Researchers find that the power of the fossil fuel sector, exercised at a grassroots level, must meet a compelling counterpart in the social benefits conferred by the renewables sector on local economies.

The road to cheap hydrogen production is riddled with potholes and energy losses. One Australian team of researchers has shown that rethinking solar technology and skipping electrolysers holds great promise for attaining the hydrogen grail.

An Australian government-backed trial of peer-to-peer (P2P) solar trading has demonstrated the potential of localized two-sided energy markets and blockchain technology to improve the energy system. However, current electricity tariff structures would need to be modified to realize the full stack of values that this technology has to offer.