Technology

Australian-headquartered solar data specialist Solcast has been acquired by Norwegian energy assurance and risk management company DNV as it seeks to strengthen its solar forecasting services to help maximise the value of PV power plants globally.

An international research group claims that raw materials and land availability do not present a real barrier for a global energy system with solar at its centre. They said that forecasts for PV growth should not have their axis on utility-scale power plants and instead consider vertical PV, agrivoltaics, and floating PV as the source of future big market volumes.

The hydrogen stream: ZeroAvia tested its new 19-seat hydrogen-powered aircraft, Chinese scientists unveiled new tech to promote bubble removal in electrolysers, and Egypt-Japan University of Science and Technology researchers claimed that the most efficient hydrogen production systems are based on waste heat.

Indian researchers have presented a new way to develop effective electrode materials for superpower redox flow battery (RFB) systems. Their flow cell with heat-treated nickel-rich platinum-nickel coating on the graphite felt delivered an impressive ever-best power density of around 1,550 mW cm−2.

Japan’s largest oil company, Eneos, has opened a green hydrogen demonstration plant at Bulwer Island in Brisbane. While the scale of the project is relatively small, producing just 20 kilograms of green hydrogen a day, Eneos Senior Vice President Yuichiro Fujiyama says the company will expand the project’s scale “in near future.”

A Victorian-based startup which claims to have developed a hydrogen enhancement kit that injects hydrogen into existing diesel engines to reduce diesel use, has begun the production of 10 commercial-ready systems. It will do field testing with the systems on sites of potential customers.

Last year was a tricky one for solar, with each segment from residential to commercial to utility behaving quite differently. The industry trends have been laid out in Sunwiz’s latest Australian PV Report and pv magazine Australia takes a dive into what happened and what there is to learn.

Researchers from the University of Adelaide, along with international partners, have successfully used seawater with no pre-treatment to produce green hydrogen. The team did this by introducing an acid layer over the catalysts in situ. “We have split natural seawater into oxygen and hydrogen with nearly 100% efficiency… using a non-precious and cheap catalyst in a commercial electrolyser,” University of Adelaide’s Professor Shizhang Qiao said.

UK scientists have discovered that second-life batteries could provide a lower levelised cost of electricity (LCOE) than conventional batteries in school buildings equipped with PV in East African schools. They said the cheapest system configuration uses either 7.5 kW or 10 kW of solar with 20 kWh of storage.

Australian energy software provider Evergen will take its solar and battery optimisation technology to Japan after teaming with Japanese companies Sharing Energy and Sassor on a pilot project to explore how to best commercialise distributed energy resources, including rooftop solar and residential battery energy storage systems, in Japan.