The Bouldercombe big battery has resumed its commissioning process after releasing a report last week that identified the cause of the fire in September in one of the project’s Tesla Megapack battery modules. The fire in the 50 MW/100 MWh battery caused a brief but spectacular blaze and brought the commissioning of the project to…
Australia is in a “global race” to stake a claim in the booming solar manufacture market – a supply chain spanning polysilicon, wafers, cells and modules that in 2021 was valued in excess of $US40 billion, an increase of more than 70% from 2020. At the moment, China has an iron grip on the market,…
Fortescue has stepped back from its ambitious 5.4 gigawatt (GW) Uaroo Renewable Energy Hub but still plans to build something on the site. The company dropped its planning approval application last month for the project, which was supposed to host a multi-gigawatt solar farm, 340 wind turbines and huge amounts of battery storage across the…
Wyatt Roy on SunDrive’s progress towards making cheaper, more sustainable solar – right here in Australia. Plus: Will 2023 be a record year of rooftop installs? You can find previous episodes of the Solar Insiders podcast here or on your favourite podcast platform. Pylon is a proud sponsor of Solar Insiders. nextracker is a…
Quality assurance company PV Lab Australia and tech company QE Labs have recently undertaken the first drone-based electroluminescence (EL) inspection to a solar farm in Australia. While traditional EL inspections – a kind of x-ray but for solar panels – would only be done on a sample of a farm’s PV, the drone-based technique can…
Solar giant Longi has claimed a new world record of 33.9% for the efficiency of crystalline silicon-perovskite tandem solar cells, beating the previous record for the technology by 0.2%. The Longi record was reported in the latest certification report of the US National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), and surpasses the 33.7% recorded by King Abdullah…
In December, Australia will play host to a world-first conference on ‘quantum energy’, the harnessing of quantum mechanics principles to create better, more efficient energy technologies. The inaugural International Conference on Quantum Energy (ICQE), hosted by CSIRO, reflects a growing belief in the ability of science’s most incomprehensible realm to expedite the global shift to…
Australian solar innovator SunDrive is a step closer to realising its vision of producing 5GW of modules a year, after securing an $11 million grant to scale up its solar cell production line to a commercial level. Federal Labor announced on Wednesday that it was making an $11 million investment in the Sydney-based SunDrive through…
The increasingly urgent mission to establish a solar supply chain in Australia has a new and cashed-up champion, with one of the nation’s biggest renewable energy investors revealing plans to build a polysilicon manufacturing facility on Queensland soil. Australian-owned Quinbrook Infrastructure Partners announced its $8 billion plans to build the first ever Australian polysilicon production…
Chinese solar manufacturing megalith JinkoSolar announced on Monday that it has achieved a new record maximum solar conversion efficiency of 26.89% for its N-Type monocrystalline silicon solar cells. JinkoSolar, which is one of the largest solar module manufacturers in the world, achieved the “major technical breakthrough” for its 182mm-and-above high-efficiency N-type monocrystalline silicon solar cell….
Rooftop solar continues to take a big bite out of the business and operating model of Australia’s main grid, hitting new output records on Sunday and sending minimum demand records tumbling across the country. According to data provider GPE NEMLog, rooftop solar PV hit a new peak of 48.6 per cent of total generation at…
By Tina Soliman-Hunter and Madeline Taylor, Macquarie University The world is currently dependent on oil and gas. Since the Industrial