R&D industry collaboration for renewables

The Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA) has announced nine research and development (R&D) projects to be supported through its latest Industry-researcher collaboration R&D funding round.

Minister for the Environment Greg Hunt, Western Australia Minister for Energy Mike Nahan, LandCorp CEO Frank Marra and Curtin University Professor of Sustainability Peter Newman joined ARENA in Perth to mark the occasion yesterday (13 April).

ARENA CEO Ivor Frischknecht said the projects would ultimately aim to benefit businesses and consumers by integrating more renewables into our energy networks and industrial processes.

“A range of renewable energy technologies are represented, including storage, biofuels, wave power, solar PV and solar thermal,” Frischknecht said.

“The project led by Curtin University of Technology aims to unlock the potential of renewables in medium-density strata developments while the University of Wollongong-led one aims to develop a low-cost, high-density sodium battery.

“University of Adelaide will lead a project to find out if solar thermal energy can be integrated into Alcoa’s alumina refining process and Queensland University of Technology will work with industry to explore how to produce biogas from sugarcane to further reduce the sugar industry’s fossil fuel use.

The Australian National University is leading three projects: one will develop a system to estimate the power produced by all the rooftop solar PV in a given area, another will look at how robots could capture data for solar installation diagnostics and the third will look at how battery storage and solar can solve network constraint problems on Bruny Island.

“The project led by the University of Western Australia will determine the optimum size and location of wave energy arrays and the University of South Australia-led project will develop low-cost phase change materials, which can store solar power for the industrial refrigeration market.”

Details on the projects are available from ARENA.

Originally published here.