Oceania

The Australian Energy Regulator has approved more than $300 million of funding to support early works on the HumeLink project which is expected to boost overall transmission capacity in New South Wales, paving the way for gigawatts of new wind, solar PV and storage projects.

In just eight years time, the Labor government wants Australia to be 82% powered by renewable energy. That means a rapid, historic shift, given only 24% of our power was supplied by renewables as of last year.

Thailand’s Ratch Group has boosted its renewable energy ambitions in Australia and south-east Asia with the purchase of Singapore-based renewable energy company Nexif Energy’s pipeline of nearly 2.7 GW of wind, solar and storage assets in a deal valued at more than $870 million ($US605 million).

Researchers in China have reported a colourisation strategy for solar based on photonic glass. They created solar panels that took on blue, green, and purple hues, while only dropping the efficiency of power generation from 22.6% to 21.5%.

Sydney-based lithium-ion battery specialist Magnis Energy Technologies has begun commercial production of full-sized cells at its manufacturing plant in the United States with plans to increase production to 38 GWh of battery cell capacity per year by the end of the decade.

With headlines dominated by spiking electricity prices and energy security, the demand for off grid solutions in Australia is booming. “It’s starting to make financial sense, that’s significant,” Matt Miller, the marketing manager for Victorian company Commodore tells pv magazine Australia.

After turning down the initial bid last month, Australian developer Genex Power this morning confirmed it will progress with a revised acquisition offer from a consortium of private equity firms led by Skip Capital, belonging to Australian technology billionaire and Atlassian cofounder Scott Farquhar.

As community opposition to overhead transmission line grows, the Victoria-based Energy Grid Alliance has released a report imploring the energy industry to better understand why the phenomenon is gaining momentum – positing the ‘talk to them early and pay them more’ approach will only further decay the situation. Instead, the group says real attention needs to be paid to social license and ensuring environmental and socioeconomic impacts of chosen transmission corridors are considered from the get-go.

A study into exporting green hydrogen from the 8 GW HyEnergy hydrogen Project in Western Australia’s Gascoyne region without an onshore port has found it to be both commercially and technically feasible.

The world’s largest asset manager, US company BlackRock, has acquired Victorian battery storage developer Akaysha Energy and its portfolio of nine projects in the national grid.