Technology and R&D

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.

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%.

SA Water, one of the largest water utilities in Australia and most ambitious when it comes to renewable energy, has partnered with aerial solar inspection and data analysis company, Above, to monitor the performance of its 360,000+ solar panels.

An international team of scientists developed a technique to isolate individual sources of electrical ‘noise’ within a solar cell. Comparing the technique to being able to pick out a single voice within a 200-person choir, they say the technique will help to improve understanding of where efficiency losses occur within a cell, and effective ways to mitigate them.

The Australian National University today opened its Distributed Energy Resources Lab, dedicated to researching and testing technologies including batteries, solar panels and electric vehicles which it says will “underpin the energy grids of the future”.


Saudi scientists have tested several cooling technologies for solar panels and have found that active techniques work better than passive ones under harsh climatic conditions. The most effective one consists of a system based on four heat pipes immersed in a box of liquid, as liquid bulk, integrated with the back of the solar panel.