EnergyAustralia: the gentailer counting down to Yallourn’s exit
1,480 megawatts. That’s the hole in Victoria’s supply that opens up when Yallourn shuts in mid-2028, and it’s EnergyAustralia’s problem more than anyone else’s, because EnergyAustralia owns the plant. The company has known the date for years. It locked it in publicly back in 2021, trading an earlier flagged closure for a firmer, later one, […]
Iberdrola Australia: the Spanish major building quietly
Drive the Augusta Highway north out of Port Augusta and you pass the old Northern and Playford power station sites before you even get to the turbines. That’s not incidental. Iberdrola Australia’s Port Augusta Renewable Energy Park sits on ground that used to burn South Australian brown coal, and the company has been happy enough […]
Akaysha Energy: the battery developer with no retail brand
Ask most households in New South Wales who Akaysha Energy is and you’ll get a blank look. There’s no logo on a bill, no call centre, no retail tariff to compare on a comparison site. Yet drive the backroads near Wallerawang, or follow the transmission easement south of Gunnedah towards the Orana REZ, and you’re […]
5B’s Maverick panels: prefab solar leaves the roof behind
A standard 1MW ground-mount array takes a crew of six roughly two to three weeks to rack, wire and commission, assuming the ground’s cooperative and the weather is too. 5B says its Maverick system does the same job in two to three days, with a smaller crew and a fraction of the concrete. That’s not […]
Tilt Renewables: the super-fund wind book, turbine by turbine
Rye Park’s turbines are visible from the Hume Highway now, strung along the ridgeline between Yass and Boorowa, and that’s the thing about Tilt Renewables: it’s one of the few wind developers in this country where you can actually stand on a public road and count the finished product rather than squint at a render. […]
Tesla Energy Australia: Powerwall, Megapack and the SA VPP now
Two Powerwalls hung dark on the garage wall of a townhouse off Sherriffs Road in Reynella last month, and the owner couldn’t work out why his app had gone quiet. Nothing dramatic, as it turned out: a firmware push had knocked the gateway offline for a day. But it’s a decent way into the state […]
Zen Energy Australia: the retailer standing in Whyalla’s shadow
Two numbers to start. Zero: the count of turbines, cells or transformers actually energised at Zen Energy’s flagship Templers battery site in South Australia’s mid-north, more than four years after the project first cleared planning. And somewhere north of a thousand: the number of jobs at a steelworks 400 kilometres away that the South Australian […]
Ampol’s AmpCharge gamble: EV chargers on the servo forecourt
Pulled into an Ampol on the Hume Highway just south of Yass a few weeks back, mid road trip, and there they were: two AmpCharge bays, one occupied by a Tesla Model Y, the other empty, sitting next to eight bowsers doing a much brisker trade. That’s the whole story of Ampol’s electrification bet in […]
ACEN Australia: the Philippines-backed builder behind New England Solar
Drive the New England Highway south out of Uralla on a clear afternoon and you’ll see it before you see much else: rows of panels running off toward Walcha, a substation compound with more transformers than you’d expect for a paddock, and a construction camp that’s shrunk from its peak but hasn’t gone away. That’s […]
Santos: Moomba’s carbon bet and the Narrabri gas standoff
The short version: Santos runs one of the biggest carbon capture projects on the planet in a paddock outside Innamincka, has spent the better part of a decade trying to get a gas field in northern New South Wales into production, and keeps turning up in every conversation about why the east coast might run […]