Technology

Scientists in South Korea developed a porous carbon material that, when applied as a coating to the separator film in a lithium-sulfur battery, was shown to reduce an unwanted side effect and improve the battery’s performance and reliability. The coating is based on methylene blue, a type of salt commonly used in textile dying.

Australia’s electricity retailers have been ranked from best to worst in terms of green credentials, igniting calls for retailers to make emissions information public and transparent.

Perovskite-silicon tandem cells offer one of the surest pathways to much higher solar efficiencies, one that has moved close to commercialisation in the past few years. Much of the work getting to this stage has naturally focused on developing a viable perovskite top cell. Optimisations to the silicon layer underneath, however, will also be important to the overall device function and efficiency. Scientists in Germany examined five different silicon cell concepts similar to those in mass production today, finding that with a few optimisations these could reach efficiencies up to 30.4%.

Spanish renewable energy company Acciona is using a robot dog, instead of drones, to monitor a solar park in northern Chile. The device has a built-in thermal vision system that generates thermographic reports on the status of the different PV plant components, as it walks between the panel rows following a programmed route.

A pair of researchers from the University of California San Diego have proposed to precompute certain data when the grid is flooded with solar or wind power, and then store it on servers for later use.

The company behind bill management platform 1bill on Monday announced it will invest more than $2 million in the energy software company Accurassi. The investment will see Accurassi build a platform for energy retailers to accelerate the transition to green energy.

After the deluge of announcements last year, 2022 will see the trickle of big batteries actually operating in Australia turn to a flood. According to Rystad Energy, the country’s battery capacity is set to double before the year is out.

Researchers from Finland and Sweden have reviewed different ways to store compressed gaseous hydrogen, including storage vessels, geological storage, and other underground options.

Standalone power systems utilising solar PV and battery technology continue to gain traction in the Australian market with New South Wales Government-owned network service provider Essential Energy announcing it will seek input from customers living at the “edge of the grid” as it seeks to expand its roll out of the off-grid technology.

Renewable energy investors’ appetite for large-scale development in Australia appears far from sated with the New South Wales Government revealing almost 50 new solar PV, wind and energy storage projects, totalling more than 34 GW, have been proposed for the South-West Renewable Energy Zone.