Australia

The federal government says new standards have been approved that will allow vehicle-to-grid charging in Australia – enabling electric vehicles to not only charge but also supply power back to homes or the electricity grid – by the end of the year.

The New South Wales government has given final planning approval for a 250 MW solar farm and 150 MW / 600 MWh battery energy storage system being developed by Canadian Solar in the state’s Southern Tablelands region.

Australia is in the middle of an historic transition away from fossil fuels to renewable energy and this transition is not without challenges. Investment in new, large-scale renewable energy capacity has been slowed by grid bottlenecks, slow planning approvals, rising costs, and a lack of alignment between energy supply and demand. This has many experts fearing Australia will not meet its ambitious 2030 climate targets.

Investment in large-scale renewable energy generation continues to trend upwards in Australia with more than 1.4 GW of new solar and wind projects, worth $3.3 billion, reaching financial commitment in the third quarter of 2024.

A team from the University of New South Wales School of Photovoltaic and Renewable Energy Engineering has reinvented the design of screen-printed contacts to reduce costs and silver consumption, without sacrificing the efficiency of tunnel oxide passivated contact solar cells.

A 2 GW+ solar and battery project near the New South Wales outback town of Cobar is one of multiple projects planned by new Australian subsidiary, called Voyager Renewables, of Danish clean energy investment company, Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners.

The founder of Perth-based wave energy technology business, WaveX has said its under-development wave power generator can be combined with solar and decrease costs of reaching a given level of dispatchability, a claim backed by a Blue Economy report.

Canadian-headquartered developer and operator of long-duration storage systems Hydrostor is set to install an advanced compressed air energy storage facility at a minesite near the New South Wales outback city of Broken Hill.

The Australian Energy Regulator’s State of the Energy Market report has found, in the FY 2023-24, rooftop solar exceeded 20 GW in the National Electricity Market making up a quarter of the maximum electricity that can be produced in the grid.

The Australian arm of France-headquartered utility, EDF Renewables Australia, has partnered with Melbourne’s Swinburne University of Technology to launch a program driving innovation for the energy transition.