Australia

An off-grid residential system on a secluded island in Australia has received a new tech upgrade. The additional capacity highlights the new era of off-grid living available to remote households in the country.

Australian researchers have shown that free electric vehicle (EV) charging facilities using optimized solar systems can lower grid demand in the evening, with implications for broader nationwide efficiencies.

As rooftop solar racks up records in Australia, price cannibalization has resulted in a “struggling” large-scale market segment. Bruce Mountain, head of the University of Victoria’s Energy Policy Centre, says that increasingly depressed wholesale electricity prices during the day are squeezing out big PV.

Tripling clean energy generation capacity to 11 TW by 2030 was a leading pledge from the United Nations’ (UN) climate change conference in Dubai. With few details about infrastructure and energy storage and no clear PV targets, however, it is hard to judge the effectiveness of the 28th global Conference of the Parties (COP) meeting. Angela Skujins considers possible impacts for the solar industry.

Proa, an energy forecasting company, is rolling out its technology at solar farms at two national defense facilities in northern Australia, with positive implications for scheduling solar energy commitments with certainty.

Next System, a clean-tech research company, claims there will be a further doubling of public fast-charging sites in Australia in 2024. It says the number of electric vehicle (EV) charging stations throughout the country almost doubled in 2023.

The rebound effect consists of a reduction in expected gains from a more resource-efficient technology as a result of behavioral or systemic change. An international research team has investigated this phenomenon in the residential PV segment in Vietnam and has found that it could happen in any country where the policy supporting solar power is not fully and scientifically explained.

UK renewables developer Pacific Green Technologies says it will double down on battery energy storage systems as a priority in 2024, as it has expanded its global pipeline to 6 GWh over the past year.

While investigating on the effects of wildfire smoke on rooftop PV installations, a group of scientists in Australia has discovered that solar arrays, due to their sensitivity to smoke, could serve as an early warning detection of wildfires by providing temporal and spatial information on the presence and approximate concentrations of smoke.

Researchers from the University of New South Wales have rejected suggestions that end-of-life solar panels could create a “waste mountain” in Australia, saying instead that they could serve as valuable material reservoirs for future production.