The Australian Capital Territory, the country’s federal district and home of national capital Canberra, is supporting the planned roll-out of 36MW of customer-sited batteries by funding a further AU$3 million (US$2.39 million) in rebates.
French renewable energy developer and independent power producer Neoen, which together with Tesla recently delivered a 100MW / 129MWh grid-supporting battery system in South Australia, has just signed a “support agreement” with local authorities for its next big project in the country.
Construction on Australia’s first utility-scale wind, solar and energy storage hybrid project to be connected to the national grid is about to start near Hughenden in northwest Queensland.
A 250-home ‘virtual big battery’ was switched on in Canberra, Australia last week, allowing residents to sell solar-generated power at a significantly higher price than available to them through feed-in tariff (FiT) policies.
Applications made to the government of New South Wales in Australia for two solar farms totalling 285MW of capacity are open to comment from stakeholders and members of the public.
Trade associations the Australian Solar Council and counterpart the Energy Storage Council have merged together to form the national Smart Energy Council.
While energy storage can be considered “critical” to Australia’s transformation to a distributed, low carbon energy mix, a lack of investment and planning for the technology could have negative consequences for the network.
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.
Australian redox flow energy storage maker Redflow says a Thai factory set to start producing its batteries could be producing 30Wh annually when it becomes fully operational.
The Clean Energy Finance Corporation (CEFC) and the Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA) have both financed the Kennedy hybrid solar, wind and storage project in north Queensland, which is being developed Windlab and Eurus Energy.
