Renewables are getting cheaper all the time – here’s why

The stars are aligning for Australia to transition to 100% renewable electricity. Our fossil fuel infrastructure is ageing, which means we will soon need to invest in new power generators. New technologies such as battery storage could revolutionise long-standing business models. With care, the transitions away from fossil fuels could offer greater job opportunities. Our latest research, which corroborates previous work, shows the technology already exists to solve many of the remaining questions around technological capability. For instance, the fact that wind and solar don’t generate electricity when the wind isn’t blowing and the sun isn’t shining can be dealt with by …

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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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Why sharing may be future of energy

Two years ago, NSW solar installer Geoff Bragg had a vision. “Imagine a system where one customer could sell energy to another customer, via the Distribution Network Service Provider, who ‘clips the ticket’ for transferring the energy,” he wrote in an article published on RenewEconomy in March 2014. “Anyone with a smart meter could join the market as a buyer or seller,” Bragg wrote. “…If that sounds difficult to do, remember this is an IT and accounting exercise (the physics is sorted already). Think about peer-to-peer file sharing… It would be a piece of cake for a handful of the right …

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In time, all cars will be electric, driverless and running on renewables

Speculation about the future of transportation, like common flu, appears to be contagious. Not a week goes by without another celebrity, business guru or executive predicting that future of transportation is electric. That, you may say, is probable and not newsworthy. What is newsworthy is that many of the same people are predicting that the transition is likely to be at a pace much faster than many had expected. In July 2016, for example, Virgin Group founder Richard Branson was quoted as saying that he suspected that 15 years from now every car on the road would be electric. Chances …

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