News

Australia’s Federal Government has given ‘major project status’ to ASX-listed Australian Vanadium’s namesake project located in the Murchison province in Western Australia.

The GCL System chief executive made comments that fly in the face of an expected solar gold rush in China that analysts predict will start this month. Though rising overseas demand will address overcapacity fears, according to Luo, the soundbite is sure to chill PV boardrooms across the world’s biggest solar market.

An Australian thermal energy storage company has reached in principle agreements to pilot thermal batteries in the telecommunication and eco-housing industries.

A solar energy capital in regional Victoria, a community power hub and a renewable energy auction, these are just some of the innovative and sustainable solutions being celebrated at this year’s Victorian Premier’s Sustainability Awards.

On August 9, a thunderstorm caused 1.5 GW of generation capacity to go offline within seconds in the U.K. The incident caused millions of households to temporarily lose power but the situation could have been considerably worse if not for the country’s battery storage reserves.

The Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA) has today announced funding to United Energy, a Victorian distribution business, in order to trial a voltage-reduction demand response in an effort to deliver grid stability over the Australian summer.

At a CEDA event exploring ‘Opportunities in the Future Energy Market’, AEMO’s Audrey Zibelman and a lineup of energy thought leaders highlighted the need to value firming services in the new asynchronous energy market, and heralded real-time visualisation of grid and asset performance in the form of digital replicas of the NEM and WEM.

Solar panel developers have long recognised the detrimental effects heat has on cell performance — an ironic sunny side effect. Australian company Sunovate has designed a cooling system that boosts energy output, and harnesses all that hot air.

In part two of this feature on wind resilience in the PV industry, the lack of structural codes comes into focus. Weather events, and wind above all, are the most common causes of failure for PV plants. In the United States, the first steps have been taken to catch up with other industries and a dedicated chapter for PV is set to be included in the next update of the American Society of Civil Engineers code. In Europe, no such plans are in place.

Extreme wind events are the biggest cause of failure and insurance claims for any PV plant, according to Thorsten Kray, Head of the Building Aerodynamics Department at Institut für Industrieaerodynamik GmbH, Aachen. For structural reasons, single-axis trackers are more prone to the issues than fixed-tilt structures. In this two-part series, pv magazine will examine the ways that wind impacts trackers and what EPCs and investors need to look out for, in addition to outlining a range of approaches from big tracker suppliers that were designed to mitigate wind-related damage.