Oceania

Western Australia has never been closer to demonstrating commercial-scale green hydrogen, as Infinite Green Energy’s MEG HP1 project, which uses the 11 MW Northam Solar Farm, is now pushing toward completion.

An international team of scientists developed a nanoparticle structure which, when added to a solar cell, was shown to scatter light and potentially reflect it many times within the cell, contributing to a noticeable jump in current.

Miner Rio Tinto has received offers to build more than 4 GW of solar and wind capacity, as the company has sought proposals to help it cut carbon emissions at its operations in the Australian state of Queensland.

Construction has commenced on what will be Western Australia’s biggest battery energy storage system. The first of the battery units installed for the 100 MW/200 MWh Kwinana Big Battery will be built at the site of the decommissioned Kwinana Power Station near Perth.

Scientists in Australia have demonstrated a new way to apply a passivating contact layer to silicon cells. They produced an n-type cell with aluminum-titanium passivating contact and 21.9% efficiency, and claimed the technique could open up new possibilities for the use of transition metal oxides in cell passivation.

Scientists in Australia have looked at how gettering technologies could improve passivating contacts based on polysilicon and silicon monoxide (SiOx) for tunnel oxide passivated contact (TOPCon) solar cells. They found that the gettering strength of the P-doped poly mainly depends on the doping concentration.

A new study shows that hydrogen could be produced for as little as AUD 2.85 ($1.98) per kilogram, supporting Frontier Energy’s plans to make green hydrogen from a 500 MW solar project it is developing in Western Australia.

The Australian state of New South Wales has given the green light for another large-scale solar PV and battery project. German renewables developer Wirsol Energy has revealed that it has secured amended development approval for a 445 MW solar and energy storage hybrid power plant in the state.

Australian startup Hysata is seeking to commercialize a breakthrough made at the University of Wollongong which CEO Paul Barrett describes as a “brand new category of electrolyzer” with 95% system efficiency.

An international research group has reconstructed the trajectory of p-type wafers in the heterojunction solar cell segment and has identified the lack of knowledge about boron-oxygen related light-induced degradation (BO-LID) as the main cause for the limited adoption of these wafers and the success of their n-type counterparts. According to the scientists, however, there is still big room for improvement for p-type technologies in heterojunction cells.