j2martin, Author at CleanTechnica

Battery Incentives Meet VPPs: The Next Step For Battery Attractiveness In Australia

August 1, 20195 years ago j2martin 0 Comments

Enabling households to tap into battery value streams additional to the standard ‘solar self-consumption’ approach will be crucial in driving uptake by making batteries more attractive. These include hard, financial benefits like virtual power plant (VPP) participation revenues (for energy market participation as well as grid services) which help shorten payback periods, as well as non-financial benefits such as improved energy self-reliance and blackout protection.

Home Battery Storage In Australia: Are We There Yet?

May 30, 20186 years ago j2martin 0 Comments

Australia has one of the highest rates of rooftop solar penetration in the world. This fact (combined with a few other factors detailed below) has arguably made Australia the biggest hot spot for home battery storage in the world — both in terms of hype as well as actual technology uptake.

Wholesale Solar FiT Brings Australia 1 Step Closer To Distributed Grid

October 10, 20168 years ago j2martin 0 Comments

With the highest penetration of residential rooftop solar in the world, Australia is a testing ground for the role that distributed generators can play on the grid. Despite this fact, energy production incentives for rooftop solar systems are currently minimal or nil, leaving homes to try to maximise their solar … [continued]

Australia’s Road To Cheap Solar Power Also Leads The Way To Energy Storage

May 25, 201510 years ago j2martin 4 Comments

Australians now have access to some of the cheapest electricity in the industrialized world — but not because grid electricity rates are low. In fact, Australians pay a lot for the electricity that they purchase from their utilities (and are generally quite unhappy about this). Instead, as Hugh Bromley of Bloomberg … [continued]

Philadelphia’s Temple University To Host 63kW Solar Plant

October 14, 201311 years ago j2martin 1 Comment

Temple University’s Edberg-Olson Hall will soon be home to a 63 kilowatt solar array on its south-facing roof, the school’s website reports. The plant will be built, owned, and maintained by Philadelphia-based Community Energy Inc. The power that the solar plant generates will be sold to the university at rates … [continued]

Cost of solar PV installations in the US.

At What Point Will Small-Scale Solar Energy Storage Become Viable?

October 9, 201311 years ago j2martin 9 Comments

Energy storage is a hot topic in the cleantech sector, as the technology quickly moves closer and closer to financial viability. Lux Research anticipates that the residential market will lead the way in uptake, riding on the shoulders of rooftop solar PV’s phenomenal growth globally. If the dance between the winding … [continued]

Sydney to be Home to Australia’s Largest Multi-Roof Solar PV Installation

August 3, 201212 years ago j2martin 2 Comments

The City of Sydney looks like it will claim the crown for the country’s largest rooftop PV installation, with a 1.25-megawatt (MW) installation edging out current record-holder University of Queensland’s 1.2-MW system by just 50 kilowatts (kW). Although questionable whether the arrays constitute a single monolithic ‘system’, the tender … [continued]

Turmoil in Australia: Queensland Government Announces Drastic Cuts to Solar Bonus Feed-in Tariff Scheme

June 26, 201212 years ago j2martin 8 Comments

The Queensland state government has announced that its Solar Bonus Feed-in Tariff scheme will be reduced to 8c per kilowatt-hour for those who submit applications after midnight 9 July 2012. The scheme currently offers solar system owners 44c for every kilowatt-hour of solar electricity that they feed into the power … [continued]

The State of Commercial Solar Power in Australia

May 3, 201213 years ago j2martin 53 Comments

Commercial-scale and utility-scale solar power are viewed as the next frontier for the solar industry in Australia. The incentives that drove the wild boom in residential solar power — state-run feed-in tariffs coupled with federal up-front discounts in the form of renewable energy certificate — have mostly died down, … [continued]

Australian-Made Tindo Solar Panels to Take on Chinese Giants?

March 20, 201213 years ago j2martin 5 Comments

Update: SilexSolar has actually restarted its Australian PV production, as of February. In the same year that Australia saw its only home-grown solar PV manufacturer shutter its factory in Sydney due to increased competition from Chinese solar system component imports, another company popped up to claim the mantle of … [continued]