Technology and R&D

Hydro Tasmania and buyers Macquarie Group and ERM Power have signed a ‘Virtual Storage’ deal which will see the pumped-hydro company sell the rights to its highest priced periods of ‘discharge’ and buying a fixed MW block of low-priced ‘charge’. The innovative contract is the product of the ARENA-funded Renewable Energy Hub.

Unlike other nations with more limited land and faster growing populations, Australia has not yet understood the symbiotic benefits which accrue when solar PV and agriculture are combined. This week, the Victorian Government announced its Horticulture Solar Energy program and $5 million in funding for the Tatura SmartFarm to experiment with solar atop a pear orchard.

Throughout 2020, a fast-moving story played out in PV module technology, with the introduction of larger wafers and subsequently larger module formats seeing the industry break into two camps, backing either 182 mm or 210 mm wafers. It remains to be seen whether one or the other will become a new industry standard, and both sizes will likely be plentiful on the market for the next few years at least. pv magazine takes a look at how we got to this point.

Dutch company Rads Global Business has developed an anti-soiling coating for solar PV modules that is claimed to reduce cleaning cost by around 60%. The anti-reflective and anti-corrosive coating is also said to mitigate potential-induced degradation (PID).

Switzerland’s Smartvolt has developed a special mounting system that facilitates the quick deployment of small ground-mounted PV systems at the base of ​​wind turbines.

A Western Australia app which allows schools, households and, from February, businesses to track and improve their carbon footprint is gaining both attention and prominent partners. The company’s founder and CEO, Vanessa Rauland, spoke to pv magazine about its rise.

SMA Australia had a bumper year in 2020, despite increasing competition and Covid-19, and partly because of the West Murray crisis. What’s next?

A collaboration between the U.S. National Renewable Energy Laboratory and the UNSW has yielded a new efficiency record of 32.9% for a tandem cell device utilizing III-V materials. Key to the achievement was a new technique enabling the researchers to take advantage of “quantum wells” in the material that serve to trap charges and enable tuning of the cell bandgap to absorb more of the light spectrum.

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.

Powertracer is a new Australian-developed data platform that accounts for the origins of each retail customer’s energy in half-hour blocks. The effect is to open up new models of choosing and offering renewably sourced energy, and accelerate demand.