Australia

The 15 MW Sunshine Coast Solar Farm at Valdora, Queensland, has far exceeded savings expectations in its first year of operation while offsetting 100% of the local council’s energy usage across all facilities and operations.

Italian renewable monitoring platform provider Elemize is looking to bring its battery controller unit Bamboo to the Australian market. Targeting aggregation uses such as in Virtual Power Plants (VPP), Elemize is aiming at Australia being the first market it expands into after its native Italy.

The Beryl Solar Farm, under development in New South Wales, has been purchased by PV asset fund New Energy Solar. 87 MW Beryl is the second Australian First Solar project to be purchased by New, with its 15-year PPA in place attractive to the asset owner.

Chinese module maker Risen Energy has begun major earthworks and site preparation before mounting system installation at the 121.5 MW Yarranlea project in Queensland. While Risen has not tapped local financing for the project, indeed any outside finance at all, the company has highlighted its local contractor workforce, in a statement today.

Installer Natural Solar is equipping 12 homes in Sydney with rooftop PV and sonnen batteries, and will utilize blockchain technology to facilitate P2P trading of electricity between households. The mini virtual power plant (VPP) project will allow the homes to reduce their electricity demand from the grid by 90%.

The extent of the rapid growth underway in the Australian PV market has been laid out in the latest report by the APVI. Pointing to 2018 representing “another record year for Australian PV” the outstanding growth of the utility scale segment is a particular highlight – with 1.1 GW commissioned and 1.9 GW under development.

Construction works are expected to start soon on two utility-scale solar PV project in New South Wales with a combined capacity of more than 460 MW, as confirmed by German-based Belectric, which will handle the EPC and O&M duties on both sites.

In a wide ranging report released on Tuesday, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) has recommended scrapping the Small-scale Renewable Energy Scheme (SRES) – which provides a sizeable capital subsidy to small scale rooftop PV. The Smart Energy Council has criticised the proposal and called for the Federal Government to “rule out abolishing the SRES.”

This year, more than 200,000 small-scale solar systems are set to be installed in Australia. The extraordinary expansion in rooftop solar deployment has been revealed in the latest figures from Green Energy Markets, which points to more than 1.4 GW of sub-100kW PV being added throughout the year.

DNV GL, Deakin University, the CSIRO, and the Smart Energy Council have come together to collaborate on a two-year project to develop a new performance standard for distributed energy storage systems. The work behind the proposed Australian Battery Performance Standard is being funded $1.9 million from ARENA and the Victoria state government.