New South Wales

Renewables developer FRV Australia has announced its 90MW (AC) Sebastopol Solar Farm located in grid-challenged south of New South Wales is now operating at 100% of its capacity.

Following the early success of its solar integrated Gannawarra Energy Storage System, Edify Energy has again opted for Tesla Megapack as its preferred battery energy storage system for its combination of storage projects totalling 150MW/300MWh in the Riverina region of New South Wales.

Sydney’s Bay Port will soon be offering 100% renewably sourced power to docked ships, a world first for a dry-bulk precinct and the first in the Southern Hemisphere for a cruise terminal.

Australia’s biggest power producer AGL has secured planning approval for a 500MW/2GWh grid-connected utility scale battery to be developed at the site of its coal-fired Liddell power plant in the New South Wales Hunter Valley.

“We’re not talking about incremental improvement, this is a really giant leap,” Hysata CEO Paul Barrett told pv magazine Australia. Hysata is commercialising a breakthrough made at the University of Wollongong which effectively, Barrett says, invented a “brand new category of electrolyser” vastly improving efficiency. “This is a 20% gain. This is really a seminal moment for the hydrogen industry.”

Star Scientific, a hydrogen technology company based north of Sydney, has won the global South By Southwest innovation award for its Hydrogen Energy Release Optimiser, or HERO technology.

Renewables developer X-Elio has unveiled plans to build a massive 300MW solar farm and battery energy storage system near Wagga Wagga in south-western New South Wales as it looks to further cement its place on Australia’s renewable energy landscape.

With the owners of Australia’s coal-fired generator fleet fast tracking the closure of the ageing infrastructure, the New South Wales government has unveiled a new corridor for transmission lines that could help it almost quadruple the size of the planned Central-West Orana Renewable Energy Zone.

Origin Energy has announced plans for a potential Hunter Valley Hydrogen Hub underpinned by a deal it’s made with mining and infrastructure company Orica.

The potential early retirement of Eraring has been the talk of the market the past week. Many of our customers have been asking what the impacts of the retirement might be on the acceleration or development of new renewable capacity in NSW and potential storage projects. In this Chart of the week, we look at the effect of the lost generation from Eraring and how that capacity might be filled.