Oceania

If the hydrogen economy was fuelled by announcements, it would be booming. In reality, little has come to operational fruition yet. More alarmingly, there is a complete “void of activity” in the Australia’s crucial early stage industry development, BayWa r.e. Australia’s Dr James Hamilton tells pv magazine Australia. “We’ve got a lot of ground to make up and if we don’t acknowledge that, we’re not going to make that ground.”

Australia’s two dominant tracker companies, Nextracker and Array Technologies, are launching terrain following products which the companies claim mitigate, sometimes even eliminate, the need for earthworks on site, opening up a host of previously unsuitable land for solar. Nextracker has just completed its first terrain-following project in Australia, with Array Technologies’ line set for delivery in the second half of 2023.

“Australia’s critical minerals are at the centre of an important moment in history which could dictate the shape of the world that we will live in for the next century,” federal resources minister Madeleine King told the Rare Earth Conference in Canberra. With the strategy to grow critical mineral supply chains between Australia and the US gaining momentum, this concept of “friendshoring” was in the spotlight at All Energy 2022.

Bolt-in electric vehicle kits in Australia have just got a leg up, with Melbourne startup Jaunt Motors joining forces with UK company Zero EV to operate a new, larger scale business to have production facilities and operations across Australia, the UK and, “very soon,” the US.

The Australian arm of Philippines-based AC Energy Corporation, or ACEN, has had its vision for an 8 GW clean energy portfolio including solar, wind, battery and pumped hydro supported by a $75 million (USD 48 million) investment from the Clean Energy Finance Corporation.

“Integration” was the war cry at this year’s All Energy conference in Melbourne, with an unmistakable push, especially among ‘premium’ brands, toward vertically stacked product suites bundling solar, batteries, energy management platforms, virtual power plants and electric vehicle chargers into one super solution. How big is the market for such a proposition in Australia though? And does streamlining stymie flexibility? pv magazine Australia spoke to a number of brands on the promise, and limits, of the full stack strategy.

Set to land on Australian shores in Dec. 2022, German solar panel manufacturer AE Solar has modified a panel to meet the continent’s particular stress factors, including our far higher temperatures, UV doses and humidity. “Since we think it’s a kind of localised, or environmentally adapted module, we think it can be a selling factor for this particular line,” AE Solar’s Head of R&D, Dr Hamed Hanifi, told pv magazine Australia during Melbourne’s All Energy conference last week.

There is almost a daily announcement about a major green hydrogen project being built somewhere in the world. Hydrogen and ammonia can be made from fossil fuels but also from renewable energy and water using an electrolyser producing zero carbon emissions. It is critically important that we can tell when it is zero emissions and prevent ‘greenwashing.’

The University of Technology Sydney’s (UTS) Institute for Sustainable Futures (ISF), in collaboration with the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) Climate Science Centre, has published the findings of its national “Climate Skills Survey” of financial professionals. 

New releases, a confluence of auspicious milestones, and output growing by gigawatts gave Trina Solar in Australia cause to celebrate at All-Energy this week.