Oceania

Plans to build a large-scale solar farm at Harlin in Queensland’s Somerset Council region continue to gather momentum after Singaporean infrastructure investor Keppel Corporation agreed to pour more than $3 million into the project.

A vanadium redox flow battery will be installed at a Western Australian caravan park in the new year. Supplied by VSun Energy, the installation advances its parent company’s vanadium endeavours.

A collaboration between the U.S. National Renewable Energy Laboratory and Australia’s University of New South Wales has yielded a new efficiency record of 32.9% for a tandem cell device utilizing III-V materials. Key to the achievement was a new technique enabling the researchers to take advantage of “quantum wells” in the material that serve to trap charges and enable tuning of the cell bandgap to absorb more of the light spectrum.

Australian scientists have developed an algorithm to increase both the efficiency and compatibility of light sensitizers in solar panels.

The Australian Energy Market Commission’s latest annual Residential Electricity Price Trends report shows costs are falling as renewables build-out replaces inefficient coal-fired generation.

Centennial Coal has secured more than US$3.8 million in government funding to assess the feasibility of turning a coal mine near Newcastle, New South Wales, into a pumped hydro storage site that could supply 600 MW of renewables to the grid.

Cornwall Insight estimates Australia’s energy storage pipeline at 7 GW, although most of that capacity is still in the proposal phase. More than 900 MW of storage will be built by 2024 – far more than the market operator’s 2020 forecast.

Australian scientists have demonstrated two loss-mitigation techniques that could improve solar‐to‐hydrogen (STH) conversion efficiencies and may lay the ground for cheaper PV-powered hydrogen generation. By combining the two techniques, they were able to achieve an STH efficiency of around 19.4% at realistic operating temperatures.

Vena Australia has reached financial close on its Wandoan South Big Battery, thanks to ING Australia. The international bank is increasingly financing green energy projects, but this is the first standalone battery project it has financed in the Asia Pacific. Vena Energy Australia says this phase is just the beginning of a project that is to feature 650 MW of solar PV and 450 MW of battery storage.

Australia’s first utility-scale vanadium flow battery will be built in South Australia. It will demonstrate the tech’s potential to provide energy and frequency control ancillary services for the national grid.