Policy

With senators having called for plantation-wide solar powered pumping projects, funded by public money, the country’s National Irrigation Administration has agreed and said it wants to embrace floating solar facilities too.

With 90% of world economies committed to net zero targets, the disruptive nature of the energy transition is becoming clear. Climate targets require us to triple renewable energy capacity by 2030, phase out coal by 2040, end fossil fuel subsidies, and ensure support for a just transition. While hydrogen is sure to be a key technology in this energy transition, the exact role it will play is not yet clear, reports Felicia Jackson.

With the owners of Australia’s coal-fired generator fleet fast tracking the closure of the ageing infrastructure, the New South Wales government has unveiled a new corridor for transmission lines that could help it almost quadruple the size of the planned Central-West Orana Renewable Energy Zone.

Climatic trends, extreme conditions and sea level rise are already hitting many of Australia’s ecosystems, industries and cities hard. As climate change intensifies, we are now seeing cascading and compounding impacts and risks, including where extreme events coincide. These are placing even greater pressure on our ability to respond.

China’s largest state-owned grid operator and power utility plans to deploy the world’s biggest battery fleet and almost quadruple its pumped hydro storage by 2030, thus supporting the nation’s switch to renewable energy sources.

The deployment of standalone power systems in the National Electricity Market is expected to accelerate after the Australian Energy Market Commission this week published new rules allowing distributors to install the renewables-based technology in the five market jurisdictions.

More than 3 million Australian households and small businesses have voluntarily installed rooftop solar systems but a local council in New South Wales is looking to mandate the continued rollout, investigating the potential for all new homes built in its region to be required to have solar PV panels on the roof.

A cohort of 25 New South Wales councils has signed a renewable energy supply deal worth an estimated $180 million that will see the local government associations supplied with electricity sourced from three of the state’s large-scale solar farms.

India and Australia have signed a letter of intent to cooperate on scaling up the manufacture and deployment of ultra-low-cost solar and “clean” hydrogen.

Shipping containers storing roughly 100MW of LONGi solar modules have been released, reports ROTH Capital Partners in an industry note, while Trina has had the vast majority of its detained product released, if not all of it entirely.