Australia

The nation maintained the highest score of 62.7 for solar in the latest edition of Ernst & Young’s renewables attractiveness index. It ranked third for overall renewable energy investment. 

Australia’s University of New South Wales (UNSW) has built a reputation for strong collaboration with the PV industry, from cell passivation through to the causes of degradation. Malcolm Abbott, a senior research fellow, directs one of the UNSW teams that is continuing its work into light and elevated temperature-induced degradation (LeTID). He recently spoke with pv magazine to provide an update.

A new Wood Mackenzie report suggests that costs for front-of-the-meter battery storage systems in the Asia-Pacific region could fall by 30% by 2025. The declining costs are already having a palpable impact, as 2021 has opened with a slew of large-scale battery project announcements.

The pan-Asian renewable energy development platform, owned by Australian investment bank Macquarie’s Green Investment Group (GIG), has acquired a majority stake in Hyderabad-based commercial solar developer Vibrant Energy.

The nation has earned the highest score of 62.7 in terms of attractiveness for solar PV investment and deployment in the latest ranking of top 40 countries by Ernst & Young.

The analyst said currently, India and Australia are the only Asia Pacific countries where renewable power already costs lower than new-build coal. It predicted the trend would spread to the entire region by the end of the decade, while India and Australia would see renewables becoming further cheaper than coal.

Bifacial modules have brought significant opportunities to PV project developers, but they have also increased complexity in system design and the modeling of plant output. Australian software developers PV Lighthouse believe they have created a fix, by allowing the complexity to be handled by the use of cloud computing. PV Lighthouse CEO Keith McIntosh and CCO Ben Sudbury argue that their software can be useful for module makers, tracker suppliers, and PV project developers alike.

With this, the Indian multinational’s cumulative order book in Australia has swelled to around Rs 6,350 crore (AUD 1.2 billion).

The Australia-based global investor—which has over 408 MW of operational solar fleet in India—will use the cloud-based, hardware-agnostic platform to gain insights in real time and improve its 21 solar projects’ performance.

Having bagged large orders in the U.S. and Australia, Indian multinational engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) services provider Sterling and Wilson Solar is bidding for tenders in regions which have eased up business lines, Europe among them. Kannan Krishnan, S&W’s chief operations officer for solar in India and the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation area, speaks to pv magazine about the impact of Covid-19 on the solar EPC business and the company’s expansion plans.