Make no mistake – headlines in the mainstream press this week around Australia, climate change and energy are not positive. But enthusiasm at state level, where arguably politicians have closer relationships with their constituents, appears to run counter to apathy or even obstructionism from the top.
In order to address intermittency in its grid, the South Australian Government has introduced a AU$50 million (US$36 million) Grid Scale Storage Fund (GSSF) to help accelerate the deployment of new large energy storage projects, including pumped hydro, hydrogen, gas storage, solar thermal, bioenergy and battery storage.
Australia is to trial using solar and wind power to produce hydrogen via electrolysis, with the hydrogen then being used for long-term energy storage in the Sydney gas network.
The Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA) has partnered with Monash University and technology provider Indra Australia to trial a microgrid as a first step to powering Monash’s Clayton campus entirely with renewable energy by 2030.
Australia’s ‘peak national body’ representing transmission and distribution organisations in both electricity and gas, Energy Networks Australia (ENA), has pushed for a more consistent approach to grid connections of solar PV and battery storage by issuing a set of guidelines.
Simply Energy, the Australian retail arm for ENGIE, will aggregate 6MW of Tesla household batteries together with 2MW of demand response at commercial premises in Adelaide in a project supported by the government-backed Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA).
The first large-scale solar and battery storage project to be connected to the grid in Australia has started providing power to 3,000 homes and businesses in Far North Queensland (FNQ) while forming a test case for deliberate ‘islanding’.
Australia has launched new interactive maps of the electricity grid specifically to support decentralised usage of distributed energy resources (DERs) including battery storage, renewable energy and smart demand management.
While headlines about energy storage in Australia have been dominated by news of batteries in large-scale utility projects and the residential sector, the country’s government and renewable energy agency have identified numerous possibilities for developing pumped hydro storage assets.
Another utility-scale energy storage facility has got the green light for construction in South Australia, claimed to be the first in the country to be “backed by mostly private investment from the energy industry”.
