New South Wales

A solar-powered electric vehicle, designed and built by students of the University of New South Wales (UNSW), has claimed a provisional Guinness World Record by going 1,000 kilometres on a single charge. The researchers managed the feat in under 12 hours.

The 5 MW Woods Point Solar and Storage Farm in South Australia is open – it is one of three identical solar storage projects being commissioned by SEI and Yes Group in December, and part of a much larger mid-scale play.

The first large-scale battery to be connected to the grid in New South Wales has officially reached full production, providing fast frequency response and synthetic inertia services to the transmission network as the state looks to fill the soon-to-be-revealed gap created by retiring coal-fired generators.

Boundary Power, a union between West Australian standalone power system (SAPS) leader Horizon Power and Ampcontrol, has installed its first off-grid system for an unnamed east coast utility in regional New South Wales.

Renewable energy developer Lightsource bp will begin full construction activities on two large-scale solar projects with a combined installed capacity of 515 MWdc in Australia after successfully closing a $540 million (USD 365 million) financing package.

Another of the coordinated clean energy zones planned for New South Wales is a step closer to being developed with the state government announcing the Hunter-Central Coast Renewable Energy Zone, which has already attracted expressions of interest for almost 40 GW of generation, has been formally declared.

Researchers from UNSW have discovered a low-cost way to stabilise perovskite solar cells with a “triple function, cheap additive,” research lead Professor Hao tells pv magazine Australia. Perovskite cells using the additive have returned the best stability results yet seen in Australia, according to the team, and among the best in the world.

Australian technology start-up Infravision will team with New South Wales network operator Transgrid in a trial of a “next generation” line-monitoring system designed to optimise the performance of existing electrical transmission infrastructure and support the roll out of more renewable energy.

New South Wales network operator Ausgrid has signed an agreement with Simply Energy which will see the Melbourne-based energy retailer operate the electricity distribution company’s three community batteries in the National Energy Market.

Researchers from the University of Sydney have created a new sodium-sulphur battery which they say provides four times the energy capacity of lithium-ion batteries and is far cheaper to produce, providing the potential to dramatically reduce energy storage costs.