Oceania

Fotowatio Renewable Ventures’ Australian platform has shifted its attentions to across the ditch, teaming with one of New Zealand’s largest energy providers in a joint venture which will develop up to 500 MW of solar PV capacity over the next five years.

The companies that own and operate the Basslink undersea power cable linking Tasmania and Victoria have entered voluntary administration amid a legal dispute with the Tasmania government over an outage that occurred six years ago.

Western Australian miner IGO is building upon its renewable energy options at its Nova nickel operation after signing an agreement with Perth-based energy storage company VSUN Energy to trial a hybrid standalone power system backed by a vanadium redox flow battery.

Australia’s first coordinated renewable energy zone is to be built in the New South Wales central west with the state government revealing the Central-West Orana REZ, which will deliver at least 3 GW of renewable energy into the grid, has been formally declared.

Federal government plans to expand the mandate of the Clean Energy Finance Corporation so it can invest in carbon capture and storage technology have been criticised as “yet another attempt to prop up Australia’s thermal coal industry, at the expense of renewables”.

The town of Marble Bar in Western Australia’s remote East Pilbara region is famed for at one time recording 100 consecutive days of temperatures exceeding 37 degrees Celsius. So it’s no wonder the town’s residents have excess solar and nowhere to put it. That is, until now, thanks to the installation of a battery energy storage system beside the town’s centralised solar farm.

Buildings in the City of Melbourne could provide 74% of their own electricity needs if solar technology is fully integrated into roofs, walls and windows, new research from the ARC Centre of Excellence in Exciton Science has found.

Sydney-based zinc-bromide battery technology company Gelion will deliver 100 MWh of energy storage to Mayur Renewables for its clean energy projects in Papua New Guinea under a new deal.

Aviation H2 today it announced it has appointed a team of engineers to fast-track its ambitions of building Australia’s first hydrogen-fuelled aeroplane. The company is, however, rather enigmatic, without a website and wholly owned by Liberty Energy Capital, which itself falls into rabbit hole of ownerships. The plan comes on the same day one of Australia’s biggest renewable hydrogen players, Fortescue Future Industries, announced it’s joined forced with Los Angeles-based Universal Hydrogen to enter the aviation space.

The Morrison government today released its long-awaited electric vehicle strategy which contains neither fuel efficiency standards nor financial support for Australians buying cleaner vehicles. The strategy’s main centrepiece is an additional $178 million for its Future Fuels Fund. Rather tellingly, the strategy has been summed up “better than nothing”.