News

The Northern Beaches Council in Sydney is seeking expressions of interest from organisations able to set and and run a group Power Purchase Agreement (PPA), for its local businesses. The aim is to aggregate local businesses to collectively scale up their PPA buying power and cut time, complexity and associated costs.

Developer Energy Estate has signed a deal with Abergeldie Complex Infrastructure, which has designed vertical manmade caverns for hydrogen storage. Energy Estate co-founder Simon Currie says the partnership is about shoring up projects like its proposed 1.6 GW Hunter Hydrogen Network.

A 10 MW/20 MWh battery energy storage system associated with a Victorian wind farm has be commissioned by Ingeteam at the Queanbeyan substation in the Australian Capital Territory.

A new scientific paper takes a closer look at the record-breaking efficiency that Australia’s Sundrive announced for a silver-free heterojunction cell in September 2021, as certified by Germany’s Institute for Solar Energy Research.

A five-year Sandia Labs study on solar module degradation shows that 13 out of 23 tested module types have effective lifetimes exceeding 30 years.

Australia has paid just 38% of its “fair share” towards the internationally agreed climate finance target. The revelation speaks to the issue of fairness – a key topic at COP27, currently underway in Egypt. But Australia’s premier renewable energy event offered little hope that questions of equity and deep sustainability are being considered here, even by the architects of our own transition.

ARENA has awarded global technology company Calix $947,035 (USD 612,509) to help fund an eleven-month study into the feasibility of deploying the company’s proprietary Zero Emissions Steel Technology (ZESTY) at a demonstration plant – something both Calix and ARENA are touting as a pathway to green steel manufacturing using hydrogen in Australia.

As uplifting as Australia’s climate turn around is, SMA Australia’s Joshua Birmingham says it would be “naive” to ignore the fact that this rapid growth will present challenges for the industry, with demand potentially outstripping supply in many key areas of the renewable energy value chain. 

NREL and Berkeley Lab have proposed efficiency and stability best practices for solar water-splitting to make hydrogen, while a team of researchers from Malaysia and Pakistan have revealed their findings on the feasibility of hydrogen-based incineration.

The International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) says that solar could become the backbone of Indonesia’s energy system by 2030. However, the nation’s own expectations are still far off from IRENA’s scenarios.