In Australia’s movement to becoming a more environmentally friendly country, we are seeing many changes in the way that industries, the government and ordinary civilians go about choosing their sources of energy, often opting for solar power as a clean energy resource. This is due to the reduction in the cost of solar panel production, creating more efficient ways of storing power. Here, we will look at how renewable energy resources are reshaping Australia.
For the past 40 years, solar research at the Australian National University has been looking at ways to reduce the cost of solar energy and make it more efficient. They have been successful in helping the reduction of solar cost and also found more efficient ways of storing solar power.
In a government initiative, they have granted $1.19m in support towards new research on renewable energy technologies under the name of ARENA. Leading the team of researchers is Professor Lipiński, who with his team are developing innovations in the solar industry. This includes pushing the boundaries of Concentrated Solar Thermal (CST) in which we already use to generate electricity from the sun. Though we still haven’t learned the full potential of this technology.
Other research that is being executed on solar at the Australian National University includes focusing on solar fuels, concentrating solar power and implementing solar energy within industrial companies.
Solar is also being looked into to help the process of making iron ore into steel before it is freighted over to China from Western Australia. The current process is costing the environment heavily as coal has to be shipped over to China along with the iron ore to power the demanding energy-intense machinery to turn the iron ore into steel. This will be able to save money and resources as the process would ideally be done inside of the mine.
According to the National Energy Outlook 2018 by Bloomberg New Energy Finance, solar and wind technology will provide up to 50% of the total electricity worldwide. They also predict in the report that electricity production from the burning of fossil fuels will be reduced from 63% down to just 29%.
By more people switching to solar power and putting pressure on large industrial companies and the government to switch to solar power as well. We can continue on the journey to reshaping Australia and the way in which we utilise renewable energy resources.
If you are interested in learning more about how you can use renewable energy resources at your home or business, contact us today and find out how you can install solar power.