News

One of Australia’s largest commercial-scale green hydrogen projects has been given the go ahead with the Australian Gas Infrastructure Group reaching financial close on an estimated $53 million (USD 35.44 million) renewable hydrogen plant to be built at Wodonga in northern Victoria.

Australia’s world-leading uptake of distributed energy resources introduces potential new entry points to the grid, ushering in a legion of complex and novel cybersecurity considerations. The first in a two-part series, pv magazine Australia talks to experts about at what’s being done in this rapidly evolving landscape and where vulnerabilities lay.

BHP is planning to install more than 500 MW additional wind and solar power backed by battery energy storage in Western Australia’s Pilbara region in the next seven years as it looks to slash the use of gas and diesel in its iron ore operations.

Helena Li, president of Trina Solar’s global cell and module business, spoke to pv magazine at the recent SNEC trade show in Shanghai about the PV industry’s oversupply challenge. Li said the company is considering opening a factory in Europe and expressed optimism about future cost and price declines.

Scientists in Europe have put together a comprehensive guide to PV module degradation, examining literature and case studies on the topic as far back as the 1990s. Their paper details the primary stress factors faced by modules in the field, the most common modes of degradation and failure, and provides clear definitions relevant to reliability, quality and testing standards. Among their key findings is that a full understanding of how combinations of different stresses over varying timeframes is still missing from methods to estimate and improve system reliability.

Historic meteorological data is typically used to assess solar farm yield and secure project finance, but with climate change beginning to affect every aspect of society, past weather data may no longer be a reliable guide. Everoze Partner Nastasia Pacaut looks at how PV projects can be future-proofed in a changing climate.

Commissioning of one of Australia’s first solar-powered utility scale vanadium flow batteries has commenced with developer Yadlamalka Energy confirming that construction of its $22 million Spencer Energy Project in South Australia is now complete.

Critical energy minerals company Vecco Group has celebrated the official opening of Australia’s first commercial-scale vanadium battery electrolyte manufacturing facility in Townsville by announcing it has secured a contract to provide Energy Queensland with the state’s first grid-scale vanadium flow battery.

A $20 million (USD 13.58 million) early works package for the CopperString transmission project that is forecast to unlock 6 GW of renewable energy resources and connect Queensland’s northwest to the national electricity grid has been awarded to CIMIC Group companies UGL and CPB Contractors.

The research group led by Professor Martin Green has published Version 62 of the solar cell efficiency tables. There are 21 new results reported in the new version, a record number for the Tables.