26th June 2017 Australia’s first battery storage “gigafactory” is likely to be built in Darwin, with a new consortium planing to establish a large-scale lithium-ion manufacturing plant by the end of 2018. Energy Renaissance, a company backed by engineering group…
Consumer bills to jump as networks score court victory over regulator
31st May 2017 Australian consumers already suffering from some of the highest electricity prices in the developed world are facing even higher bills after a group of NSW network operators won a Federal Court challenge against the national energy…
South Australia: Big no to higher FiT, big yes to batteries, big yes to EVs
9th May 2017 The South Australian government is bucking the trend in other states to introduce a higher “fair” feed-in tariff (FIT) for solar system owners who are feeding excess electricity back in to the grid. Instead the focus is…
Graph of the Day: Watch Australia’s biggest polluter power down
20th April 2017 If you need a break from cyclone watching, we recommend heading over to is.hazelwood.online to witness the emissions from one of the world’s dirtiest power plants disappear before your eyes. As we reported in yesterday’s Graph of…
Chinese companies plan 1GW solar plant on Chernobyl nuclear site
22nd March 2017 China National Complete Engineering Corporation (CCEC) will work alongside two Chinese solar companies, including GCL-SI, to develop a mammoth PV plant over 1 GW, at the site of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in Ukraine, which took place…
Victoria solar feed-in tariff more than doubles to 11.3c/kWh
6th March 2017 More than 130,000 solar households in Victoria will benefit from a steep increase in their solar feed-in tariff in 2017/18, and will receive a minimum 11.3c/kWh for their exports back to the grid, up from 5c/kWh currently.…
Malcolm Turnbull has battery storage installed in Point Piper home
28th February 2017 New South Wales residents were spared rolling outages in the weekend’s heatwave, but if the lights had gone out in Pt Piper, Malcolm Turnbull just might have been able to stay cool: that’s because the PM’s harbourside property…
Turning point: solar power now cheaper than wind energy
31st January 2017 It was bound to happen, and apparently it has: utility-scale solar-generated power, certainly in sunny parts of the world, appears to be cheaper than wind and both are cheaper than fossil-fuel generated power – read the fine…
Solar feed in tariffs jump as community retailer ruffles big boys
19th December 2016 Finally, some good news for solar households. After years of being wound back to the price of coal, solar feed in tariffs are moving up again – at least in some areas – driven by competition by…
Australia failing climate targets as Paris deal comes into force
4th November 2016 A new assessment of the Coalition government’s climate change policies says Australia will fall well short of its “inadequate” Paris climate targets, and will likely increase emissions by nearly as much as it has promised to cut them.…