This is according to the updated 2022 Electricity Statement of Opportunities (ESOO) report released by the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO).

The report provides a reliability update based on changes to generation capacity with the aim of ensuring timely investment to fill any forecasted gaps created by the country’s shift away from coal power.

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The report identifies two increases to reliability risks, namely:

• Increased risk in South Australia and Victoria from 2026-27, when Torrens Island B in South Australia is now expected to retire. Forecast reliability risks increase further from 2028-29 in Victoria when Yallourn Power Station is expected to retire, and in South Australia from 2030-31 when numerous gas-fired power stations are expected to retire.
• Increased risk in New South Wales in 2023-24 due to the advised delay to the commissioning of the Kurri Kurri gas-powered generator.

AEMO CEO Daniel Westerman said in a statement: “Since publishing the 2022 ESOO, short-term forecast reliability gaps in South Australia (2023-24) and Victoria (2024-25) have been filled by new gas, wind and battery developments, along with a delay to the retirement of an existing gas generator.”

“Reliability gaps begin to emerge against the Interim Reliability Measure from 2025 onwards. These gaps widen until all mainland states in the NEM are forecast to breach the reliability standard from 2027 onwards, with at least five coal power stations totalling approximately 13 per cent of the NEM’s total capacity expected to retire.

“Urgent and ongoing investment in renewable energy, long-duration storage and transmission is needed to reliably meet demand from Australian homes and businesses,” he said.

Westerman reiterated that investment in firming generation, such as pumped hydro, gas and long-duration storage will be critical to combat renewable intermittency and meet electricity demand without coal-fired power.

The updated ESOO report also highlights the risk of events when electricity demand may exceed supply, such as in the case of extreme weather and generation and transmission outages.

Westerman added that: “The NEM has a strong pipeline of proposed generation and storage projects, totalling three times today’s generation capacity,” and AEMO will continue to work with governments, industry and the community to manage risks as the power system transitions from coal.

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The project is planned for the Hunter‐Central Coast Renewable Energy Zone (REZ) as part of the NSW Government Electricity Infrastructure Roadmap.

It will be developed in stages to support the government’s deployment of renewable targets and progressive retirement of coal‐fired power stations in the area.

Project developers Newcastle Offshore Wind Energy Pty Ltd (NOWE) have been working with EDF Renewable on the project for the last 12 months and will continue as a partner to meet project milestones.

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CEO of EDF Renewables in Australia, Dave Johnson, said in a statement: “NOWE, based in Newcastle, has put in a lot of effort to build up their local development expertise and connect with the community and stakeholders, which puts this project in a great position to succeed in the proposed location and especially within the local community.”

Johnson added, “This landmark project will be developed in collaboration with a strong local team based in Newcastle and will require the establishment of an entirely new industry in Australia. I am very confident that this project will play a crucial role in providing new opportunities for employment, establishing new business and the revitalisation of existing business looking to transition from existing industries”.

EDF Renewables operates seven offshore wind farms globally and a further five are under construction including one with floating technology in France.

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The hub is being touted by the partners as the most advanced future energy transition hub of its kind in Australia.

Located at the University’s Hawthorn campus in Melbourne, the hub will feature advanced digital energy technology from Siemens and the technical, Research and Development (R&D) and teaching expertise of Swinburne.

The AU$5.2 million (US$3.6 million) hub aims to build a future energy grid laboratory accessible to students and industry to work on solutions for greener, more efficient future energy systems through Siemens Xcelerator, their open digital business platform and marketplace.

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The hub’s offerings

The hub will enable users to leverage digital twins of energy grids, map scenarios, research new findings, develop original and creative hypotheses and test results.

It will be home to a digital twin of Australia’s energy grid that commercial research teams can use to run simulations of new, innovative solutions and software.

In addition to microgrid and planning stations, the hub will also feature Siemens’ Microgrid Management System (MGMS) and Decentralised Energy Optimization Platform (DEOP) software.

The microgrid technologies include Sicam A8000 and Siprotec 5 devices for control and protection. The planning stations feature Siemens PSS software which is used by over 70% of utilities and independent system operators including AEMO and grid operators.

Deputy vice-chancellor, research, professor Karen Hapgood, stated, “Australia’s ambitious carbon reduction targets need a multi-pronged approach by industry, research and government.

“The new Siemens Swinburne Energy Transition Hub will be working on new technologies to improve energy efficiency, supply, integration, storage, transport and use, as well as how we can improve existing technologies and frameworks.”

Jose Moreira, country business unit head – grid software, Siemens Australia and New Zealand, added: “Tackling the speed and change in the energy landscape to create solutions that help achieve net zero requires a collaborative and co-creative approach…

“The Hub features some of the latest and best technology used by organisations across the world and will hopefully spark new Australian innovations for future energy challenges.”

In addition to R&D and commercialisation projects, the hub will deliver short courses for industry professionals. It will also give back to Swinburne students, with Siemens software and the company’s real-world industry experience integrated into engineering technology courses.

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The 288MWh VS1 project is claimed to be Australia’s first commercial CSP plant and will begin operations in the latter part of 2025.

The plant will make use of Vast Solar’s modular CSP technology. The solar company aims to demonstrate the performance of its technology at utility scale to unlock further investment opportunities.

According to Vast Solar, their modular design, use of sodium as the heat transfer fluid, and patented control systems, allow the generation of higher temperature heat and greater reliability.

The $203 million project will also demonstrate the value of CSP in delivering reliable and dispatchable renewable energy to Australia.

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Darren Miller, chief executive of the Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA) said the expansion of Vast Solar’s technology into a commercial scale project shows that CSP technology could play an important role in generating and storing renewables at scale.

“With the increasing need for dispatchable renewable generation and longer duration energy storage, CSP has potential to assist Australia’s energy transition alongside pumped hydro and large scale batteries,” said Miller.

“Vast Solar’s global recognition as a leader in CSP technology innovation, combined with its significant technical and commercial expertise, mean that it is well placed to deliver Australia’s first large scale CSP plant which should deliver power at a cost competitive with other forms of renewable generation.”

ARENA’s funding for VS1 is conditional upon the project reaching financial close, which is expected in late 2023.

Craig Wood, chief executive of Vast Solar, said: “We are grateful for ARENA’s long-term support. Their understanding of the potential of our CSP technology is a testament to the Australian Government’s ambition to deliver cost-competitive dispatchable renewable energy to help uphold emissions reductions goals while supporting local jobs and industry.”

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Scientists from Australia’s Deakin University’s Institute for Frontier Materials (IFM) have successfully tested a new process that can extract silicon from old solar panels, and convert it into a nano material that can be used to build better batteries.

This converted nano-silicon is then mixed with graphite to develop a new type of battery anode shown to increase lithium-ion battery capacity by a factor of 10.

More than 100,000 tonnes of end-of-life solar panels will enter Australia’s waste stream by 2035 according to the research team. For this reason, lead researcher Dr Md Mokhlesur Rahman believes it’s critical to develop a successful recycling programme to divert old panels away from landfill and harvest and repurpose the panels’ most valuable components.

“Solar panel cells are fabricated using high-value silicon, but this material cannot be re-used without purification, as it becomes highly contaminated over the 25 to 30 years of the panel’s life,” Dr Rahman said.

“We have developed a process that returns silicon collected from used cells to greater than 99 per cent purity, within a day and without the need for dangerous chemicals. This thermal and chemical process is far greener, cheaper, and more efficient than any other technique currently on the market.”

The Deakin process then takes this regular-sized purified silicon and reduces its size to nanoscale using a special ball-milling process. Again, without the need for toxic chemicals.

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“We are using that nano-silicon to develop low-cost battery materials that will help deliver the higher performing, longer lasting, affordable battery technology critically needed to drive Australia’s clean energy transition,” Dr Rahman said.

The current market price for nano-silicon is about $45,000 per kilo, compared to about $650 for regular silicon, and it is in even higher demand. Not just for new battery materials, but also for use in the development of nano-fertilisers, innovative new methods for carbon capture, and on-demand hydrogen gas generation.

By recycling solar panels, the IFM team has found a way to make this seriously expensive material more accessible. They estimate their technique could generate US$15 billion in material recovery if extrapolated to the 78 million tonnes of solar panel waste expected to be generated globally by 2050.

So far, the work has been supported with funding from the ARC and Sustainability Victoria, and the team is now talking with industry about plans to scale-up their process.

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Saft has been awarded a the contract by Meridian Energy to construct the facility at Ruakākā in the country’s North Island.

The 100MW system is intended to boost stability of the national grid at a time when intermittent renewable power generation is increasing in New Zealand.

A subsequent stage of the project will see the construction of a co-located 130MW solar farm Meridian Energy.

Meridian boss Neal Barclay said the storage system will open multiple new revenue streams for the company, with the ability to load shift between price periods and participate in the North Island reserve electricity market.

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He added that the system will deliver annual revenues of up to $35 million.

“As intermittent renewable generation increases in New Zealand, this BESS will help manage supply fluctuations and reduce this country’s reliance on fossil fuels,” he explained.

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“We have a bold vision for Ruakākā, with a grid-scale solar farm planned to further speed up our transition to a low carbon economy.

“The shared infrastructure provided by the BESS will significantly improve the economics of the future solar farm.”

Saft’s scope of the contract comprises battery and power conversion equipment, installation, commissioning and 20 years operational services.

The system is due to enter service in the second half of 2024 and will have storage capacity of 200 MWh.

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With the high frequency (10MHz) vibrations during the electrolysis, the engineers were able to split the water molecules to release 14 times more hydrogen compared with standard electrolysis techniques, along with a net positive energy saving of over 27%.

This then offers the prospect of lowering the production cost and opening the way for plentiful supply of cheap green hydrogen.

Associate Professor Amgad Rezk from RMIT University’s School of Engineering, who led the work, said the team’s innovation tackles big challenges for green hydrogen production.

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“One of the main challenges of electrolysis is the high cost of electrode materials used, such as platinum or iridium,” he commented.

“With sound waves making it much easier to extract hydrogen from water, it eliminates the need to use corrosive electrolytes and expensive electrodes such as platinum or iridium. As water is not a corrosive electrolyte, we can use much cheaper electrode materials such as silver.”

Another notable finding in the work, which has been published in the journal Advanced Energy Materials, was that the sound waves also prevented the build-up of hydrogen and oxygen bubbles on the electrodes.

Typically the hydrogen and oxygen gas build-up can form a gas layer that lowers the electrodes’ activity and significantly reduces their performance.

An Australian provisional patent application has been filed on the technology, which also is expected to have use for other applications, especially where bubble build-up on the electrodes is a challenge.

In the next step, the research team hope to collaborate with industry partners to address the challenges with integrating the sound-wave innovation with existing electrolysers in order to scale up its use.

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The MacIntyre Wind Precinct currently consists of two wind farms; the 923MW MacIntyre farm, owned by ACCIONA Energía and Ark Energy, and CleanCo’s proposed Karara Wind Farm.

The Herries project will double the MacIntyre Wind Precinct capacity to 2,000MW.

“Today we’re proud to announce that we have commenced development activities for the Herries Range Wind Farm to add an additional thousand megawatts of renewable energy to Queensland’s energy mix,” said ACCIONA Energía’s managing director in Australia Brett Wickham. “With this project we expect to dramatically accelerate the decarbonisation of Queensland’s electricity grid.”

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The announcement was made during a visit to the Port of Brisbane by Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk, where the premier and cabinet ministers inspected wind turbine components awaiting transport to the MacIntyre Wind Precinct 60km west of Warwick.

“Our goal is to roll from construction of MacIntyre straight into the neighboring Herries Range. This means that workers can move from one large scale project to the next whilst staying in the same area,” said Wickham.

“In total, the MacIntyre Precinct would reach a capacity of 2GW, representing an overall investment of more than AUD$4 billion ($2.7 billion) and enough clean energy to supply the equivalent of 1.4 million homes per year.”

Energy minister Mick de Brenni said in a statement: “This precinct will support ongoing local jobs and local supply chain opportunities with hundreds of millions of dollars in procurement from businesses based in and around towns like Warwick, Inglewood and Toowoomba.”

The 1,023MW MacIntyre Precinct, already under construction, will be equipped with 180 new 5.7MW turbines.

The wind farm will be constructed on land used mainly for sheep farming. Current farming practices will continue during the construction and operations phases of the wind farm.

The site was selected due to its exposure to consistent winds across this part of the country.

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The research grant from the Australian Research Council’s Linkage Infrastructure, Equipment, and Facilities scheme will be used to build a state-of-the-art research infrastructure that is capable of precise, real-time monitoring of important electrical parameters.

The group will also conduct research into adaptive energy-efficient technologies that are essential for the metaverse with the goal of integrating these technologies in a prototype energy-efficient metaverse.

The initiative appears to be one of the first, if not the first worldwide.

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Susilo, head of the University’s School of Computing and Information Technology, says the aim is to establish a world-class facility for conducting research on metaverse technologies.

“The metaverse is widely anticipated as the next technological breakthrough that will revolutionise the way we interact, learn, work, shop and entertain in the new digital economy. However, metaverse technologies require a tremendous amount of computation and energy to serve millions of concurrent users,” he comments.

“The proposed facility is expected to support the development of energy efficient algorithms and systems for the metaverse and establish Australia’s leadership in this emerging area of major economic and societal impact.”

Susilo’s research to date has focussed mainly on cybersecurity and cryptography.

Other University of Wollongong participants are Professor Son Lam Phung who specialises in artificial intelligence, power systems researcher Associate Professor Ashish Agalgaonkar, Associate Professor Yang-Wai Chow and Dr Yannan Li whose main research interest is blockchain.

The University of Wollongong in a release points to the growing demand for the development of the metaverse as people and companies are shifting their activities online and working remotely.

The release also quotes a Gartner figure that up to a quarter of people will spend at least an hour per day in the metaverse by early 2026.

University of Wollongong Deputy Vice-Chancellor Professor David Currow commented: “The ARC funding shows these ground-breaking ideas have a sound foundation and will enable UOW researchers to keep searching for the next world-changing discoveries in science and technology.”

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The study follows on from the team’s 2019 identification of 530,000 potential pumped hydro sites across the globe. 

If developed, the sites would be key to developing cost-effective, reliable and renewable electricity grids, ANU said.

“This process [of generating electricity using a pumped storage facility] can occur continuously for more than 50 years, making PHES a viable long-term storage solution to support solar and wind generated electricity and help the nation reach its target of achieving net zero,” said professor Andrew Blakers, from the ANU College of Engineering, Computing and Cybernetics.

The ANU Bluefield PHES Atlas is designed to help accelerate Australia’s adoption of renewable energy systems and help the country reach its emissions reduction targets. Bluefield PHES sites are locations with an existing water reservoir that can be used. This means only one more reservoir needs to be built in order to achieve a PHES pair. 

“Basically, we searched near every existing reservoir in Australia to find a potential matching reservoir site,” Professor Blakers said.

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ANU student Ryan Stocks, who was heavily involved in the work, said PHES presents an off-the-shelf, low-cost, mass storage option that can be used to help drive the nation-wide transition to clean energy systems based on solar and wind technology.

“PHES provides about 95% of global energy storage. Australia needs a lot of storage to support variable solar and wind electricity on the way to reaching its target of 82% renewable electricity by 2030,” he said. “While batteries are rapidly falling in price and can compete with PHES for short-term energy storage, up to several hours, PHES is much cheaper for prolonged periods of energy storage and can store electricity for several days or weeks.”

Australia has about 300 times more PHES storage potential than required to support a 100% renewable energy system. “We can afford to be choosy and only develop the very best sites,” Stocks said.

The Bluefield Atlas uses geographic information system (GIS) techniques to identify potential PHES sites. Reservoir sizes shown in the atlas could provide 2 GWh to 500 GWh of energy storage.

However, none of the PHES sites discussed in this study have been the subject of geological, hydrological, environmental, heritage and other studies, and it is not known whether any particular site would be suitable. The commercial feasibility of developing these sites is unknown.

PHES pairs are presented with no limit on depth fluctuation of the existing reservoir, nor any analysis of environmental, social, geological, hydrological, etc. impacts of these fluctuations.

The new atlas complements the University’s Greenfield Atlas, which lists 4,000 off-river PHES sites that are not linked to existing reservoirs. Greenfield sites require two new reservoirs to be built. Through their Bluefield and Greenfield atlases, the ANU researchers have so far identified about 5,500 potential sites across Australia that could be used.  

The ANU Bluefield and Greenfield atlases received funding from the Australian Renewable Energy Agency.

Originally published on hydroreview.com

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