Technology

Brisbane-based battery casing company Vaulta has more to celebrate than just Brisbane’s winning 2032 Olympic and Paralympic bid. The company has won a Federal government Accelerating Commercialisation grant that will see its innovative design pushed ahead as the tide of electric vehicles rising globally.

Recent research has revealed a previously underestimated role for oxygen in limiting the performance of lithium-ion batteries. Newly published research from both Japan and the United States has sought to look deeper into the chemical reactions at the heart of lithium-ion storage; and to better characterise the cumulative effects that minuscule amounts of oxygen released during these reactions can have on battery performance and safety.

Compressed air energy storage is not exactly a new technology, but recent months have seen this older storage technology with a new lease of life as intermittent renewable sources of energy come to the fore. Recent large-scale air storage plants have been announced in North America and the Middle East, and now some of that hot air has arrived on Australian shores.

A 125 kW/500kWh storage unit will be tested by China’s National Photovoltaic and Energy Demonstration Experimental Center. The storage system will be provided by Canadian specialist VRB Energy.

Kent Kernahan has set out to take the heat out of solar cells. He and his partners may end up bringing solar manufacturing jobs to disadvantaged communities, while making low-cost rooftop solar more widely available.

According to a new study from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, hydrogen-fired gas plants will compete with lithium-ion storage for seasonal storage and their competitiveness will strictly depend on the heat rate of the gas power plants they may replace.

Researchers from Melbourne’s Monash University have unveiled new machine learning technology which has already delivered a 45% improvement in the precision of power output forecasts at large-scale wind and solar farms and could potentially pave the way for increased renewable energy penetration in the grid.

Researchers at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory have developed a revolutionary lithium-metal battery chemistry that could allow electric vehicle batteries to almost double their capacity, while also overcoming historic setbacks.

The generator can be combined with batteries, solar panels, or small wind turbines. It is based on a proton exchange membrane fuel cell technology and is claimed to have a minimum lifetime of 5,000 working hours.

Scientists demonstrated a perovskite-silicon tandem cell that reached 27% conversion efficiency. Though higher tandem cell efficiencies have been achieved, this represents a big jump in efficiency for those utilising n-i-p architecture, which previously had not surpassed 22%.