Australia

A bill which would make home batteries up to $3,000 cheaper nationwide has been tabled by Independent MP Helen Haines. Haines proposes making home batteries eligible for Small-scale Technology Certificates, the same scheme behind Australia’s thriving rooftop solar sector.

The Victorian government will be expanding its Solar Homes rebate program into the world of Virtual Power Plants (VPPs), announcing on Tuesday that households who install a battery and sign up to the pilot before July 2022 will receive a rebate of over $4000.

Australia’s first national battery recycling scheme, B-cycle, launched today giving Australians the opportunity to drop their spent household batteries at a collections bins in supermarkets, stores and community clubs across the country. 

South Australia will extend its ‘Switch for Solar’ program in which eligible low-income residents can opt to have a solar system installed in exchange for their next ten years of government concession payments.

A fire caused by a lithium-ion home battery system in northern Adelaide over the weekend has led authorities to urge solar and battery owners to be vigilant with maintaining their systems.

Australia has hit a historic milestone, reaching 25GW of installed solar. As the Australian PV Institute noted on Monday, that’s more solar per capita than anywhere else in the world.

Western Australia will today introduce new curtailment rules which will allow for all new and upgraded solar PV and battery energy storage installations with an inverter capacity of 5 kW or less to be remotely turned down or switched off in emergency situations.

The proposed 1.5 GW Marinus Link transmission project, which would link Tasmania and the Australian mainland via an undersea electricity interconnector, has reached another milestone with the launch of a new engineering survey which aims to identify the most suitable corridor for the cables.

On 16 March 2021, the Australian Energy Market Commission (AEMC) published a draft determination rule which confirms the mandatory primary frequency response (PFR) arrangements to remain unchanged beyond the sunset date of 4 June 2023 established in March 2020. The primary frequency control band implemented under mandatory PFR is 49.985Hz -50.015Hz.

Renewable energy production reached record highs in Australia in 2021 with new data from the Climate Council revealing clean technologies including rooftop solar and utility scale PV supplied five times more power into the nation’s largest electricity grid than gas.