News

A new research project being led by the University of New South Wales will investigate how rooftop solar PV and other distributed energy resources (DER), including small-scale batteries can be best integrated into Australia’s power grid.

Green energy fund CEP.Energy has unveiled plans to construct Australia’s largest rooftop solar farm and a new grid-scale battery on the outskirts of Adelaide as part of its ambition to build 1.5 GW of solar and 2 GW of big battery capacity around Australia.

Sun Cable continues to progress plans for the world’s biggest solar+storage project, lodging a development application for the first phase of a solar module manufacturing and assembly facility to be constructed in Darwin.

An independent exhibition brought to Melbourne Design Week by a group of 15 of the city’s top architectural firms demonstrates the blueprint for Melbourne’s transformation to “A New Normal”. “A New Normal” is a plan to transform Greater Melbourne into a self-sufficient city by 2030.

Iconic Australian beer Victoria Bitter has partnered with Diamond Energy and Power Ledger to develop Solar Exchange, a blockchain-enabled platform that allows residential PV owners to exchange their excess solar for cases of beer. This is not an April Fool’s prank, miracles do happen, stay calm and exchange your excess solar for slabs!

A 1.2 MWp installation featuring more than 4,500 solar panels has sheltered a berry crop from high temperatures and damp to strengthen the claims made by agrivoltaics companies that their systems can offer climate change mitigation as well as clean energy.

Two recent studies have separately shown that many scenarios assessing global decarbonization pathways are still predicting too-low future PV capacity and too-high LCOEs for the solar technology. The researchers analyzed scenarios provided by scientific researchers, government bodies and non-governmental organizations, including the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), the European Commission, the Indian government, the International Energy Agency (IEA), and the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA), among others.

It’s come to this. The Australian Energy Markets Commission has produced a draft decision that will make households and small business with solar panels pay to inject their surplus production into the grid.

A $50,000 development grant will be awarded to the winner of this year’s national ClimateLaunchpad competition, which aims launch early-stage cleantech startups into the market.

The Clean Energy Regulator told pv magazine Australia it’s focussing its attention on rooting out misbehaving installers, armed with new automated data analytics models and stronger bonds with industry co-regulators like the Clean Energy Council.