Technology and R&D

Australian lithium developer Neometals has taken its lithium‐ion battery recycling technology to the floor at a pilot plant in Canada. SGS Canada has been contracted to construct and operate the pilot at its Lakefield facility, and handle both the front-end feed preparation and hydrometallurgical processing/refining stages.

In an Australian first, Canada’s Hydrostor is delivering a 5 MW / 10 MWh compressed air energy storage facility, which will store excess solar and wind power at a closed underground mine in South Australia.

Indra Overland, head of the Center for Energy Research at the Norwegian Institute for International Affairs, explains how the world’s future energy landscape may include pan-regional super-grids. However, prosumer states seeking energy independence could also be in the mix. According to Overland, the two developments will go hand in hand and the balance between them will be determined by the competitiveness of storage technologies.

The first sod has been turned on a $30 million smart microgrid which is to power Deakin University’s Waurn Ponds Campus. The project, featuring a 7 MW solar farm and a 1 MW battery, is delivered in partnership with AusNet Services and its subsidiary Mondo with the goal to provide an integrated research and education platform, and contribute to the university’s sustainability goals.

Australian retail landlord, Vicinity Centres, has remodelled the northern entry of one of its shopping centres with an energy-generating glass atrium in a world-first commercial application of technology developed by Perth-based company ClearVue PV.

Chemical manufacturing accounts for around 10% of global energy consumption and 7% of industrial greenhouse emissions. Researchers at RMIT University have developed a material that can capture 99% of light and directly apply it to power chemical reactions thereby slashing emissions and improving the efficiencies of current processes.

Bifacial solar panel performance has become such a hot pursuit this year that there are now at least four competing field test sites ramping up in the United States, each matching a different set of trackers and panels. The four test projects include DNV GL, Soltec, NREL and Sandia, and initial data is expected by late 2019, once a year’s data has been collected.

Solar PV is boosting regional economies by providing cheaper electricity to off-grid or edge-of-grid communities and industries; soon it could power cheaper electric aviation services. In three years, Gold Coast company magniX expects to be selling a commercially available certified electric aircraft engine that will reduce the cost of flying light commercial aircraft by between 50% and 80% per operating hour.

Engineers from the Australian National University, in collaboration with researchers from and the California Institute of Technology, have developed a way to combine silicon PV material with perovskites to achieve higher efficiencies and lower production costs.

Perovskite solar cell specialist Greatcell Solar has failed to secured refinancing for its activities and has been forced to appoint administrators. The company lays the blame at the federal government’s door, pointing to the R&D rebate changes and policy settings that are unsupportive of renewable energy investment as the reasons behind its downfall.