Capital

​

Santos has signed a 10-year binding term-sheet with the South Australian government that will see it take 20PJ of gas per year from the Moomba Central area of SA’s Cooper Basin. The arrangement will support the transformation of the Whyalla Steelworks – which Santos has supplied with gas for years – into a low-emissions green iron facility using direct reduced iron technology that processes local magnetite ore. The project is expected to reduce emissions by 50% compared to previous coal-fired blast furnace operations. (AFR)

Dutch renewable energy multinational Photon Energy is restructuring its operations in Australia, with an administrator appointed on February 18 and a creditors meeting set to be held on March 2. The firm will discontinue its engineering, procurement, and construction services and operations and maintenance services for commercial & industrial energy projects, with “continuing margin pressure… and ongoing challenges to scale business volumes” cited as the reason. Photon Energy expanded its Australasian operations just two years ago but reported this month that it had lost $2.5 million on the sale of 14.5MW of three solar and hybrid assets. (Trading View)

Soaring prices for silver have driven solar panel manufacturers to look to alternatives, with copper a popular replacement for the in-demand metal, which has seen prices soar by 130% over the past year. Silver paste is a key material for PV panels and comprises 30% of the cost of a solar cell – and its increasing price has been blamed for a 7% to 15% increase in the cost of solar panels over the past year. (Reuters)

Projects

​

Queensland's 436.5MW Tarong West Wind Farm was given federal environmental approval with construction expected to begin late this year. The Stanwell Corporation-owned project is expected to be Australia's largest publicly owned wind farm. (South Burnett)

Strong market interest in building Australia’s largest vanadium BESS is a win for renewables in the state, the WA government has announced in reporting that it received 20 responses during Stage One of the Expressions of Interest process for a project proposed for Kalgoorlie. Recent royalty reforms added a 2.5% royalty rate to vanadium royalties, which the government credits with strong interest in building the 50MW/500MWh vanadium flow battery.

Policy

​

The NSW Government expects to create over 100 new construction jobs and 67 ongoing roles after it committed $52 million under its Net Zero Manufacturing Initiative to “supercharge” NSW’s renewable manufacturing sector. New investments include $22 million for Tyree Transformers’ transformer manufacturing; $20 million for the Optimal Renewable Gas project in Griffith; $9.4million for Hiringa Energy’s low carbon ammonia fertiliser project near Moree; and $778,000 to help Hiringa Refuelling Australia create hydrogen refuelling stations aiming to replace diesel in heavy vehicles.

Major issues with the “increasingly unclear” purpose of the Integrated System Plan (ISP) framework, the development of the optimal pathway and the use of scenario planning mean changes to the framework “are too important to be ignored or postponed”, the Grattan Institute has warned in its submission to the AEMC’s ISP framework review. The current ISP “provides valuable information and analysis” but is “failing on a few fronts,” the submission explains.

The government has taken “significant steps” to improve the Australian Carbon Credit Unit (ACCU) scheme, DCCEEW has noted as it released the 2023-2025 Progress report detailing its work implementing the reform recommendations of the 2022 Chubb Review and 2023 Climate Change Authority reviews. Future work includes amending the scheme legislation, developing new methods, continuing to support participation, and improving Clean Energy Regulator data services.

Regulation

​

The ACCC’s monitoring of retail electricity pricing has set the pace for an enforcement regime that will step up promotion of competition in electricity, gas and telecommunication sectors, ACCC chair Gina Cass-Gottlieb said in a keynote outlining the agency’s priorities for 2026-2027. High concentration, significant barriers to entry and limited consumer choice remain major issues in policing an energy industry where misleading pricing and claims are still an issue, she added.

Emails released under freedom-of-information laws show that conditions attached to Environment Minister Murray Watt’s approval of Woodside extending the North West Shelf project operation to 2070 were changed several times after the gas giant’s lobbying. The released emails show Woodside was particularly opposed to two conditions: that it monitor levels of various emissions in real time, and that it reduce emissions on five-yearly intervals. (The Age)

The Australian Energy Regulator is canvassing applications for three new executive positions as part of its establishment of a risk and audit committee that will oversee the governance of its transition to becoming a standalone non-corporate Commonwealth agency from July 1. The new roles include a committee chair and committee member, with the third committee member to be appointed from another Commonwealth agency. (Governance Institute of Australia)

Technology

​

CSIRO trials of vehicle to grid (V2G) technology with Essential Energy have shown that the concept is a “potentially viable” addition to Australia’s energy mix and promises significant benefits for grid load smoothing. The trials were conducted at Essential Energy’s Innovation Hub and labs in Port Macquarie and CSIRO’s Renewable Energy Infrastructure Facility in Newcastle, and will continue until 2029 as “continued development and collaboration” make V2G a mainstream power option for homes and businesses. (CSIRO)

A major shift in battery chemistry is cleaning toxic cobalt out of the renewables supply chain, UNSW professor Neeraj Sharma has noted, tracing its replacement with the mineral olivine – which is made from lithium, iron and phosphate (LFP). LFP batteries have seen a “meteoric rise” in adoption, Sharma notes, with half of EV batteries and over 90% of home and grid batteries now using the chemistry instead of cobalt, which had been intrinsically linked to renewables because of its high energy density. (The Conversation)

New AI data centres are being built at such a breakneck pace that hyperscalers are, among many other adaptations, exploring the use of high-temperature superconductors (HTS) as an alternative to copper wiring. While copper’s intrinsic electrical resistance requires thicker cables to carry high loads, HTS materials take up less space to move large amounts of power and could enable data centre architects to improve designs by reducing transmission losses and – if applied elsewhere along the energy supply chain – increase the resiliency of electrical grids. (IEEE)

Climate

​

Woolworths Group (ASX: WOW) has met its deadline to transition all of its ANZ supermarkets, distribution centres, offices and other facilities to renewable electricity. The group has secured over two-thirds of its electricity using PPAs by backing new third-party solar PV rollouts, as well as building its own network of over 320 onsite solar systems including what it says are some of the largest rooftop solar installations in the country. “Our energy decisions have real weight in shifting the grid toward renewable sources,” chief group public affairs, communication and sustainability officer Simon Lowden said, crediting the company’s “contracting directly with renewable electricity generators and supporting new build assets.”

Research

​

Hydrogen generation and exports have been eyed as a potential export market, but logistical complexities have added to the challenges around the energy source. A team of Curtin University researchers has been aiming to fix this issue, and has now delivered an interim report detailing their success in producing laboratory quantities of a sodium borohydride based powder that can store large quantities of hydrogen. The powder could be more easily transported, then reliably releases its hydrogen content when mixed with water. The team is preparing to scale up the technology for pilot projects. (ARENA)

Electricity costs are the “dominant driver” of the levelised cost of hydrogen (LCOH), Griffith University PhD candidate Tahlia Nolan has found after an analysis that explores key strategies to bring down production costs that currently sit nearly three times higher than what the market is willing to pay. The study models supply and demand under time-sequential delivery constraints and argues that demand-side policies “are critical to creating market conditions for economic substitution” as electrolyser costs decline through 2030. (ScienceDirect)

It’s possible to detect and classify under-performing PV systems using only inverter data from the AC side of the systems, a team of researchers from University of Technology Sydney, UNSW and Diagno Energy has shown. The group’s method was validated on 2,213 inverter monitors on 1,089 solar PV systems installed across the country, using a five-step process that collected data every 5 minutes for over 30 months. (ScienceDirect)