Grids & Integration

With headlines dominated by spiking electricity prices and energy security, the demand for off grid solutions in Australia is booming. “It’s starting to make financial sense, that’s significant,” Matt Miller, the marketing manager for Victorian company Commodore tells pv magazine Australia.

The Australian government’s green bank has inked a landmark agreement with the Queensland government to develop critical transmission and grid infrastructure to connect more than 1.5 GW of renewable energy assets to the National Electricity Market.

In a bit more bad news for everyone already struggling with the current energy crisis, modelling from Cornwall Insight Australia forecasts that prices will remain at increasingly high levels for the next three years, after which they will flatten but are not likely to lose their volatility in the longer term.

Horizon Power, the state government owned electricity provider for much of regional Western Australia, is set to rollout energy management technology which integrates the utility’s assets with distributed energy resources. The technology, which uses predictive analytics, hopes to unlock access to renewables in the regions.

Network operator Transgrid has completed a $236 million upgrade to the Queensland-New South Wales Interconnector to facilitate the increased flow of electricity between the two states and reduce constraints on the New South Wales transmission network.

Australia is setting out to become a global hydrogen superpower – but the standards we’re applying to classify ‘green’ renewable hydrogen are falling well behind our global peers and the expectations of future customers. The heart of the problem is “we’ve separated the characteristics of energy from the energy itself,” Steve Hoy, founder and CEO of power tracing technology company Enosi, tells pv magazine Australia.

Melbourne’s Monash University will conduct a $1.18 million study into alternative market designs which better support energy storage technologies and drive clearer investment signals.

While curtailing solar and wind energy production can be viewed as a lost opportunity, NREL argues that it may be an important feature in the future energy grid dominated by low-cost renewable energy.

New South Wales network operator TransGrid has completed a critical transmission upgrade designed to future proof the electricity grid in Australia’s largest city, securing the energy needs of more than 800,000 people living and working in Sydney’s CBD and surrounding areas.

University of Queensland researchers will seek to develop and test a new platform designed to help streamline the process of connecting large-scale renewable projects to the grid after landing a $498,000 grant from the Australian Renewable Energy Agency.