Australia

A German start-up achieved more than 99% efficiency when charging a vehicle developed by the Bochum University of Applied Sciences with electricity from solar cells. Ambibox’s DC charging technology was used in a research project in the Australian desert.

Analyst WoodMac has spelled out the urgent need to decarbonize the global hydrogen production industry. While the fuel can offer a sustainable grid balancing act for intermittent renewables, in its current fossil-fuel driven form it is pumping out more than 800 megatons of carbon into the atmosphere every year.

Q Cells will introduce its Q.Home hybrid inverter and battery system to the Australian market at the All-Energy event in Melbourne tomorrow. It is also introducing its new larger wafer module, which hits 355 Wp on a 60-cell format.

Although the International Energy Agency’s latest renewables report forecasts impressive solar growth there is still a nagging feeling it has produced conservative estimates and the emphasis on sharing costs with grid operators is predictable.

CEO Elon Musk has continued to tease the November release of the company’s all-electric utility vehicle. In a tweet, Musk suggested the design resembled an “armored personnel carrier”.

Over the last decade, DuPont has surveyed more than 2 GW of PV installations and has analyzed a range of failure types and their causes. Hong-Jie Hu, DuPont’s solar technical and development lead in China, says that the materials giant is looking for Australian partners for its Global Field Survey program, with a particular interest in hot and humid and desert environments.

The Australian Energy Market Commission (AEMC) has released a new paper outlining a blueprint to coordinate generation and transmission investments. The draft proposal seeks to overhaul wholesale pricing and transmission access to lower electricity costs and the ever-increasing risks inherent in getting new renewable energy generation capacity into the network.

Solar infrastructure developer Lyon Group has launched a joint venture with two Asian energy generators to use integrated battery storage systems to reduce curtailment risks and increase the flexibility of renewable energy plants in the Asia-Pacific region.

Beijing’s sudden retreat on electric vehicle subsidies in the summer has caused the value of lithium to hit the floor, with disastrous effects on the balance sheets of Chinese companies which had invested big in supply chains to support anticipated huge demand.

With sun the common component of solar energy production and agriculture, a new company in northern New South Wales is set to combine the benefits of sowing PV and forage crops in the same soil.