Grids & Integration

Dutch transmission system operator Tennet, which also serves Germany, is planning to create flexible electricity demand and reduce grid congestion by promoting the use of smarter heating systems and heat pumps that can also be powered by solar and wind energy. According to its experts, intelligent control of heat pumps may result in the creation of between 0.5 and 1 GW of temporary grid flexibility by 2030.

Western Australia’s government-owned utility Horizon Power and electrical engineering company Ampcontrol have today announced their joint venture Boundary Power, supercharging the state’s standalone power system rollout and broader industry. To mark the occasion, Boundary Power has also unveiled its new, modular SPS Gen 2 and announced a $10 million deployment of another 45 off-grid systems across the state.

Australia’s largest Renewable Energy Zone (REZ) is set to be energised with the New South Wales Government announcing it will soon seek registrations of interest from solar, wind and energy storage project proponents keen to be part of the massive 8 GW New England REZ.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.