26 April 2021
One of the oft-sung laments about wind and solar is that they are not, will not and can not replace fossil fuel generation at the speed needed to meet the world’s climate targets, or even match the speed of the transitions to coal, nuclear or gas that have preceded them.
We are still at the beginnings of the wind and solar transition but it’s already clear that those claims are not true. The roll-out of of wind and solar in their first 20 years of deployment has, in fact, easily exceeded that of any technology that preceded them.
27 April 2021
This should not be news, but given the polarised debate around climate and energy politics in Australia it very much is: The prime minister of Australia, Scott Morrison, has visited a solar farm.
Why is this important, or even worth mentioning? Well, as far as we can tell, it is the very first time that any minister in Morrison’s government has visited a new wind or solar farm.
Indeed, any sort of visit by any Coalition minister to a wind or solar farm since their election in 2013 has been a rare event, despite the massive number of new facilities that have opened and transformed the country’s grid.
23 April 2021
The Victoria Labor government is launching a new pilot program that will create “virtual power plants” that will bundle together the excess energy from the state’s growing amount of rooftop solar installations and household battery storage units.
Energy minister Lily D’Ambrosio said the state is seeking expressions of interest in the program from companies with experience in aggregation and battery power.
VPPs are designed to aggregating the power from household-scale batteries and sell that power back into the grid when demand is highest. It offers additional revenue streams for solar households and boosts the reliability of the grid for everyone else.
MoneyWeek cover illustration - airline stocks
Mass international travel spread Covid-19 across the globe. No wonder, then, that the airline industry has borne the brunt of governments’ restrictions on movement during the pandemic. This has affected all parts of the sector, with “some airlines going bankrupt, others being forced to seek state bailouts and most carriers having to make large numbers of staff redundant”, says Dr Alexander Grous from the Department of Media and Communication at the London School of Economics.
Still, recent signs that vaccines could bring the virus under control have fuelled optimism, with the share prices of many airlines higher than they were a year ago. But will the bounce endure?
Big boost for battery storage in new rules that reward fast response on grid reneweconomy.com.au - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from reneweconomy.com.au Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.