Technology and R&D

The federal government will tip more than $17 million into what it said will be Australia’s first commercial concentrated solar thermal heat plant, expanding the application of solar power beyond electricity to heat generation.

Although local defects in chloride-iodide-based perovskite are hard to avoid due to ion migration, a group of scientists from the University of New South Wales has found a way to passivate them. They used different combinations of 4-chlorobenzylammonium chloride and 4-chlorobenzylammonium bromide on top of the hole transport layer and reached up to 15% improvement in efficiency.

Elumina has officially opened a manufacturing and development centre in Queensland’s southeast that it says will be the first in Australia capable of producing both community-scale lithium batteries and electric vehicle chargers.

Queensland-based energy tech company AnteoTech has secured almost $4 million in funding from the Australian Renewable Energy Agency to help fast-track the development of its silicon-dominant lithium-ion battery anode technology.

Australian battery tech company Li-S Energy has announced a major improvement in the performance of its lithium-sulphur battery technology with its latest iteration achieving an energy density close to 500 Wh per kilogram.

The Spanish company said that its new tracker “is designed for maximum adaptability to any terrain” and is compatible with all PV modules.

The Chinese manufacturer said the result was confirmed by Germany’s Institute for Solar Energy Research in Hamelin.

With hailstorms in Australia and the United States severely damaging solar arrays – including “golf-ball sized” hail at the 350 MW Fighting Jays project in Texas in March 2024 – insurers are raising premiums and reducing or canceling hail coverage. Everoze Partner Simon Mason discusses the challenges the industry faces in minimising its hail risk exposure.

Researchers from Monash and the University of Queensland have developed a nanofiltration technology to extract lithium from low-grade saltwater brines with high magnesium content. “Our technology achieves 90 percent lithium recovery, nearly double the performance of traditional methods, while dramatically reducing the time required for extraction from years to mere weeks,” researcher Dr Zhikao Li said.

China’s Longi Green Energy has set a new world record for crystalline silicon solar module efficiency with its independently developed hybrid passivated back contact (HPBC) 2.0 module, achieving a conversion efficiency of 25.4%, according to a certification report from Germany’s Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems (Fraunhofer ISE).