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Category Archives: Energy

Lower Costs, Greater Investment Produces Record Year for Australian Renewable Energy

Renewable energy produced a record share of Australia’s electricity in 2016, with a slew of new projects putting Australia on track to reach the 2020 Renewable Energy Target. More than 17 per cent of Australia’s electricity came from renewable sources last year, up from 14.6 per cent in 2015, thanks to greater rainfall in key hydro catchments and a series of new wind and solar projects, according to a new report from the Clean Energy Council. Clean Energy Council Chief Executive Kane Thornton said the industry was set for another record year in 2017. “Every month brings new project announcements. While …

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Is It Time We Upgrade Our Energy Network?

Australia is an exciting place to be right now – changes that previously took 25 years to happen are now happening in five years, and with a customer-led shift in the utility sector to a market in terms with transition. In response, we must find ways to coordinate all the complexity in the market. On the generation side and on the low side, the grids are the glue behind it all. We need grid extension, transitional lines for power transfer, and examples of reinforcement of our distribution grids with a lot of the centralised generations embedded. Increased efficiency in our …

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The gas industry needs a carbon price to compete with coal

Putting a price on carbon would benefit the Australian gas industry, at least in the short term. It is therefore in the interests of gas producers to lobby for the emissions trading scheme proposed for the electricity industry by the Climate Change Authority. At first a sight this might seem a paradoxical suggestion. Isn’t carbon pricing meant to reduce our reliance on fossil fuels after all? But with gas prices high, coal-fired generation has been increasing. Coal produces about twice as much carbon dioxide as gas when it is used to generate electricity. This is bad news for our emissions, …

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Does rapid renewables expansion mean higher electricity prices?

Perhaps one of the many points coming out of the Grattan Institute’s latest report is the idea that rapid expansion of renewable capacity must necessarily mean higher electricity prices. But what has been the experience in Europe over the last five years during which there has been a rapid expansion of renewable capacity in most European countries? The Council of European Regulators compiles useful information on retail and wholesale electricity prices. Here is a table compiled from their data, which shows their estimate of average wholesale electricity prices (in Euros per MWh) in 2008/9 and 2014 in various European countries. …

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Move to clean energy requires smart policy

The phrase “sovereign risk” is used liberally in Australian public debate, most often in relation to established industries that may be affected by change in federal and state policy. But few have suffered as much as the still-establishing renewable energy sector, which has had to deal with constant chopping and changing in government thinking since the turn of the century. This has particularly been the case since the election of the Abbott Coalition government in 2013. With an axe hanging over the renewable energy target and the abolition of the Labor-Greens carbon pricing scheme, there was a 70 per cent …

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ACT pours another $5m into battery storage research

An Australian National University research program that aims lead the world in grid-scale battery storage innovation and integration has been awarded $5 million in grant funding from the ACT government. The funding, announced on Wednesday, has been provided as part of the Renewable Energy Innovation Fund, which was set up off the back of the ACT’s first and second wind energy auctions. Last week, the Territory government announced the winners of the second round of its battery storage auction, part of a nation-leading plan to deploy 36MW of cutting edge distributed battery storage in more than 5,000 ACT homes and businesses …

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People power is the secret to reliable, clean energy.

Australia’s energy watchdog, the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO), has issued a stark warning: more wind and solar power will demand new approaches to avoid interruptions to electricity supply. In its annual Electricity Statement of Opportunities, released this week, AEMO indicated that the overall outlook for reliability has improved. So far, so good. However, South Australia, Victoria, and New South Wales are potentially at greater risk of interruptions within ten years if the current trend of shutting down old coal-fired power stations accelerates, as we can expect from Australia’s efforts to meet national and international climate targets. The threat of power blackouts is reliable …

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Renewable energy fund: QIC, Future Fund back AGL

Renewable energy fund: Queensland Investment Corporation and the Future Fund are set to become major players in the race to meet the renewable energy target, backing a $2 billion-$3bn fund with diversified energy group AGL that will build up to a fifth of the new capacity needed. QIC and the Future Fund will tip $800 million into a fund that plans to build 1000MW of new wind and solar farms along the east coast in a deal that breaks a long-running deadlock between investors and energy retailers. AGL chief executive Andy Vesey said the fund, to be announced today, will …

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Clean energy – current market trends

Marco Stella is Senior Broker, Environmental Markets, at TFS Green Australia. The TFS Green Australia team provides project and transactional environmental market brokerage and data services across all domestic and international renewable energy, energy efficiency and carbon markets. Here, Mr Stella outlines the current market trends. Large-scale Generation Certificate (LGC) market It has proven a mixed beginning to 2016 for the LGC market. A solid start across the first two months of the year saw the spot market climb into low $80 territory in February, only to soften back to a low of $75 by late March as buyers disappeared …

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The quest for the perfect wave for renewable energy is being solved by Australian science

Australia’s search for the perfect wave is being solved with a wave energy atlas. The CSIRO wave atlas project is mapping the wave energy potential of Australia’s vast coastline for renewable wave energy farms. Atlas project leader Dr Mark Hemer said the project found most of Australia’s south west and southern coastline had some of the world’s best wave energy resource. “We’ve just released a development version of the atlas,” he said. “Obviously some people are interested, like the project developers themselves or the device developers, potential financiers, [and] marine planners trying to allocate sections of the marine resource. “We’re …

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