Global mineral processor invests in CopperString 2.0
Korea Zinc Company Ltd., parent company of Townsville-based Sun Metals, has entered into a $17 million financing agreement with the 1,100km CopperString 2.0 transmission line project across North Queensland. The project, which received an $11 million boost from the Federal Government recently, would open up enormous tracts of land for the development of renewable projects and minerals.
Community solar is fighting the good fight against gas fields in NSW’s Northwest
Of the myriad tensions upon the energy transition to renewables it is perhaps the ability of solar and energy storage to be distributed among the people that has threatened the powers that be most overtly. And so, in NSW’s northwest where the federal government has pushed through Santos’s Narrabri coal seam gas project, perhaps it is community green energy non-profit Geni.Energy that is best able to show just how unnecessary such a project is.
Global companies win award for Australian VPP grid support program
Enel X, a subsidiary of Italian utility company Enel, has won the Mission Critical Tech Innovation Award at the global Datacenter Dynamic Awards 2020 for its virtual power plant (VPP) grid support program in Australia.
Government pumps $11 million into new transmission line
The Federal Government has added a new element to the National Electricity Market (NEM) equation by announcing it will provide up to $11 million to help progress the CopperString 2.0 transmission project in Queensland.
A duck for coal generators in VIC as twin outages failed to register through strong solar
Two outages at coal fired power generators in Victoria last weekend failed to faze the energy market as strong solar uptake ensured wholesale prices actually fell into the negative despite major units going offline at the height of summer.
Complementary hybrid PV systems can reduce reliance on storage
Looking back over years of research into the topic of hybrid systems based on different combinations of solar, wind, hydro and other renewables, an international group of scientists found strong potential for strategies to exploit complementarity between the different sources integrate more intermittent renewables onto regional and national grids. The scientists present a series of conclusions and recommendations that aim to push research in hybrid renewables forward.
2020 Year in Review
Soon 2020 will only be a worry to future high-school history students. But when they ask us if anything good at all happened in 2020, remember this review and tell them that solar PV shone in the darkness. Despite the mess of it all, 2020 has been another good year for Australian solar. The industry has demonstrated resilience, and significant progress has been made in the fields of energy storage, green hydrogen and others.
Transmission Project declared ‘critical’ as NSW pushes ahead with first REZ
The Central West Orana Renewable Energy Zone (REZ) Transmission Project has been declared a ‘Critical State Significant Infrastructure’ project, with the New South Wales Government granting it priority status throughout the approvals process.
50 Megs more of distributed storage called for in WA’s south west
WA continues to work through its precise roadmap to manage the state’s vast distributed rooftop solar resources and enable further uptake of renewable generation. Pre-Christmas, Western Power is seeking to engage private enterprise in providing a value stack of storage services.
New research gauges Australia’s battery energy storage pipeline at 7 GW
New analysis from Cornwall Insight Australia has put Australia’s current battery energy storage pipeline at 7 GW. Of course, the vast majority of that projection is still firmly in the proposal phase, but the over 900 MW of energy storage thought to be developed by 2024 is still far in excess of AEMO’s ISP 2020 forecast, begging the question, how is the NEM going to fit it all in?
