News

Opinions are rife and varied in the wake of the COP26 UN Climate Change Conference. What can we take away from discussions in which the Australian Government positioned itself as a climate pariah?

Western Australia leads the world in successfully implementing renewables-based energy generation for far-flung customers. Unique joint venture and pioneer in the field, Boundary Power, has been widely recognised for its innovations and is ready to repeat its SAPS successes across Australia and the Asia-Pacific.

French energy giant Engie has developed a transfer function method based on a model used to assess PV plant variability. Its researchers claim that the new approach does not overestimate the levelised cost of hydrogen (LCOH) of an alkaline electrolyser powered by offgrid solar, finding that in Australia green hydrogen produced with such systems may already be cost competitive with blue hydrogen.

A report published by BloombergNEF for the COP26 climate change summit has listed global commitments by cities, states, provinces and nations to end the sale of new fossil-fuelled vehicles but, with 2035 estimated as the cut-off date for zero-emission roads by mid century, policymakers need to be more ambitious.

In a financial world of stocks, bonds, foreign exchange, and credit cards, trillions of dollars are traded daily, with money flows handled by a bevy of databanks. In the world of cryptocurrency, billions of dollars worth of Bitcoin are traded through as many as 400,000 transactions per day, consuming the energy supply of a modernised country. The quirk is a “proof of work” feature that provides decentralised security. Is Bitcoin’s energy usage all for nothing, or is it a game-changer for renewable assets and generators? Tristan Rayner explores.

Should heterojunction solar technologies be temporarily shelved? Could copper plating replace screen-printed silver conductive surfaces in cells? Why are tandem cells a likely successor to PERC? Brett Hallam recently sat down with Natalie Filatoff in Sydney to explain the findings of a new study by the University of New South Wales (UNSW) that sought to answer these controversial questions.

Australian property investor and developer Cbus Property has revealed plans to clad a $1 billion commercial office tower being developed in Melbourne’s CBD with a ‘solar skin’ capable of generating 20% of the project’s base building electricity requirements.

Fotowatio Renewable Ventures’ Australian platform has shifted its attentions to across the ditch, teaming with one of New Zealand’s largest energy providers in a joint venture which will develop up to 500 MW of solar PV capacity over the next five years.

The companies that own and operate the Basslink undersea power cable linking Tasmania and Victoria have entered voluntary administration amid a legal dispute with the Tasmania government over an outage that occurred six years ago.

Western Australian miner IGO is building upon its renewable energy options at its Nova nickel operation after signing an agreement with Perth-based energy storage company VSUN Energy to trial a hybrid standalone power system backed by a vanadium redox flow battery.