Australia

The New South Wales Government is forging ahead with plans to bring 12 GW of renewable energy and 2 GW of storage online by 2030 with the formal declaration of Australia’s second coordinated renewable energy zone in as many months.

Anglo-Australian mining giant Rio Tinto’s ambition to become one of the world’s largest lithium suppliers has taken a battering with the Serbian government pulling the plug on the company’s $3.3 billion ($US2.4 billion) Jadar lithium-borates project.

SUN Energy’s 100 MW Merredin Solar Farm in Western Australia has emerged as the country’s best performing utility-scale PV project in 2021. International consultancy Rystad Energy says it has delivered an average capacity factor of 29.6% for the calendar year.

Scientists in Australia have analyzed the state-of-the-art of all gettering technologies used in the solar industry. This technique, which is aimed at reducing defects in wafer manufacturing, may become more important in the future, as cell efficiencies increase and become increasingly sensitive to traces of metallic impurities.

SunWiz has identified the most popular solar panel and inverter brands in the Australian market. In total, 5.2 GW of solar was installed in Australia in 2021, putting the country’s cumulative tally at 26.9 GW.

Researchers from the University of New South Wales (UNSW) predict that growth to 60TW of photovoltaics needed to rapidly reduce emissions to ‘net zero’ and limit global warming to <2 °C could require up to 486 Mt of aluminium by 2050. A key concern for this large aluminium demand is its large global warming potential.

KPS Power Generation has converted a 10 MW diesel-fueled power station at a mine in South Australia into a hybrid PV facility.

Genex Power says it is now ahead of schedule on the construction of a new engineering project to transform a retired gold mine site in Australia into a 250MW/2GWh pumped hydro energy storage facility.

The Suiso Frontier cargo vessel docked at Victoria’s Port of Hastings on Friday to take on the world’s first shipment of liquid hydrogen. The ship’s arrival is a landmark for the Japanese-Australian Hydrogen Energy Supply Chain pilot project, which sees liquefied hydrogen generated from brown coal, and an engineering milestone in itself. But while the Australian government describes the product as “clean”, experts maintain that carbon capture and storage technology has proven only to be an expensive failure.

Australian startup Endua’s plan to make modular hydrogen-powered energy generation and storage systems has been given a financial boost, as the federal government has provided it with almost AUD 1 million ($719,800) to help it commercialize its technologies.