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Category Archives: Renewables

What are the Benefits of Renewable Energy Use?

Renewable energy, or clean energy, comes for natural processes that are regularly replenished. For example – sunlight and wind. The sun keeps shining and the wind keeps blowing. Many people think of renewable energy as a new technology, but in fact, we have been using it for a long time for lighting, heating, and transportation. It is true that people have been using cheaper but dirty energy like coal or gas for the last five hundred years. However, now that scientists have found less expensive methods of capturing wind and solar energy, tables are turning. Renewable energy is booming and …

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Green homes give glimpse of renewable hydrogen future

Imagine a house where all the electricity is generated by rooftop solar. Now imagine that, in addition, the stove, hot water and heating systems are all powered by the leftover energy. It sounds like an emission-free pipedream, but the technology may be one step closer with the launch of a $3.3 million pilot project in Perth’s south. Canadian gas giant ATCO is building a micro-grid at its Jandakot base, which will convert solar power into hydrogen fuel. The micro-grid will use 1,100 solar panels to produce electricity, which will either power ATCO’s buildings or be diverted into battery storage. Any …

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2018 Program Available for Download

The 2018 National Sustainability in Business Conference Program is now available online. The 2018 National Sustainability in Business Conference will be held on Thursday 8 and Friday 9 March at the Hotel Grand Chancellor, Brisbane.  The sustainability topics that will be embraced include integration, politics, technology, automation, future of renewables, procurement, food security, sustainable construction and waste as a resource. Featured Speakers for 2018 include: Mr Lucas Cullen, Board Member, Blockchain Association of Australia Dr Helen Lewis, Adjunct Professor, Institute for Sustainable Futures, University of Technology Sydney & Environmental Consultant, Helen Lewis Research Mr Chris Nunn, Head of Sustainability, Real Estate, AMP Capital Mr Tony …

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Bunch of Old Bananas or Building Materials of the Future?

Potatoes reborn as insulation, peanuts processed into partition boards and mushroom bricks that grow in five days – just some of the ways the building trade could change its wasteful ways and construct virtuous new cities. In a report released on Wednesday, international engineering firm Arup set out novel ways for an industry that devours raw materials to cut waste. “We need to move away from our ‘take, use, dispose’ mentality,” Guglielmo Carra, European lead for materials consulting at Arup, said in a statement. “What we need now is for the industry to come together to scale up this activity so that …

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New Printed Batteries To Transform Australian Renewables

Solar panels could soon be made with their own embedded battery storage in what is an Australian global first. Batteries would be laminated to the back of the panels and deliver “in-built” storage, making it eventually standard for them to deliver energy day or night as required. It’s one of several plans for ultra-thin, flexible screen-printed batteries that could eventuate within three years and offer new opportunities for manufacturing. Currently companies such as Tesla and South Australia’s Redflow offer solar panel and battery solutions, but the batteries are separate entities. If this idea takes hold, printed-on storage could be part …

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Mr John O’Brien, Managing Director at Australian CleanTech to join us at #NSBC17

The National Sustainability in Business Conference will be held in Brisbane next week from the 23-24 March 2017. Mr John O’Brien, Managing Director at Australian CleanTech joins us next week to discuss ‘The Visions 2100 Project: Recalibrating Environmental Communications through Positive Storytelling’. Visions can mobilise communities, countries and global networks to deliver extraordinary outcomes. The human race can do extraordinary things when it needs to. With the right motivation, humans can win unwinnable wars, put men on the moon, build pyramids or create atomic bombs. However, the complex issue of climate change is one that our race is struggling to address. The …

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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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Investors keen to back Western Australia’s largest solar farm

The company behind a proposed $160 million solar farm in Western Australia’s Wheatbelt says it has been spoilt for choice when it comes to investors. Sun Brilliance Power plans to start building a 100 megawatt solar farm, the largest in Western Australia, early next year and will be finalising financial agreements at the end of October. What was originally designed as a 25 megawatt facility has been expanded four-fold after the company purchased what it described as an ideal location two kilometres east of Cunderdin in May this year. Spokesman for the company, Ray Wills said it would be the …

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Rushing to renewable energy targets puts sector’s reputation at risk

The last time an entire state blacked out was on the night the Beatles arrived in Sydney in 1964. So what happened in South Australia last week was rare and the repercussions could be vast. The key question is whether that state’s heavy reliance on wind turbines might have increased the risk of a state-wide blackout. More broadly, the event will supercharge concerns over how renewable energy is being integrated into a national grid that was not designed to cope with it. Wind presents two problems. First, it is intermittent, so all of it has to be backed up by …

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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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