Solar PV

Construction proper has officially begun on a 119 MW solar farm and 100 MW / 200 MWh battery energy storage facility in Victoria’s northwest with the state government saying the publicly owned project is on track for completion in 2027.

There was excellent news at the weekend on Australia’s accelerating progress in slashing consumers’ skyrocketing energy bills and transitioning the community to cheap, clean, reliable firmed renewables. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s announcement of a $2.3 billion program to subsidise the purchase of household batteries will deliver a 30% rebate on the price of battery systems from 1 July 2025, with small business and community facilities also eligible.

An international research team has developed a new machine that utilises shockwaves to separate the different materials of a PV module. Chemical processes can be further used to extract silicon and silver. Results show the recovery of more than 99.5% of the original weight of the panels.

The International Energy Agency warns that energy innovation is slowing as shifting priorities and financing changes hinder progress, despite past investments driving economic and security gains.

Every commercial solar system ever built, or ever to be built, will inevitably require maintenance. Yet, across Australia’s renewable energy sector, maintenance remains chronically overlooked – often treated as an afterthought rather than an essential part of solar asset management.

A global research team has developed a tandem solar cell with 30% transparency by combining perovskite and organic layers, achieving a record 12.3% efficiency for transparent solar cells.

A new paper from renewable energy technology company 3E lays out strategies to manage battery degradation, saying inaccurate state of health measurements of battery energy storage systems can negatively impact their safety, impede accurate asset evaluation and result in financial losses. 

Scientists utilising data gathered at the Northern Territory’s Desert Knowledge Australia Solar Centre have created a novel probabilistic model for five-minutes ahead PV power forecasting. The method combines a convolutional neural network with bidirectional long short-term memory, attention mechanism, and natural gradient boosting.

BloombergNEF reports the world installed nearly 600 GW of solar power in 2024, closely aligning with projections that annual global solar installations will surpass 1 TW within the next few years. Although projections for 2025 currently fall short of that pace, early forecasts often underestimate actual deployment.

United Kingdom-based manufacturer Viridian Solar says the new modules have a rated power output of 445 W and can reportedly guarantee a power yield of 95% after 10 years.