The potential for a New England Renewable Energy Hub is moving closer.
With the advent of an assortment of new and upcoming local projects, centred around wind and solar, New England could easily become the Renewable Energy centre of NSW.
This month’s forum will host a panel of interested parties, with a short input by each followed by an open forum discussion.
Adam Marshall, MHR, former Parliamentary Secretary for Renewables and now NSW Minister for Tourism, is a strong advocate and supporter of peer-to-peer trading, which would be ideal with the assortment of wind and solar farms so close together.
Sandra Royal is from White Rock Wind Farm, now looking at a hybrid system with a solar farm attached to their wind resource to extend their energy input.
And Geoff Bragg, local installer with New England Solar Power, and director of the Australia Solar Council, can provide insight into policy and technology potentials.
SLA has been holding monthly open forums for ten years, with a wide range of interesting topics. Everyone is welcome to attend. The Forum “The Wind, the Sun, the Peers and the Minister” is on Thursday 2nd March, 7pm at Kent House, 141 Faulkner Street, opposite Central Park. Light refreshments to follow, gold coin donation.
Uhm … whereabouts is the Energy Forum being held on 2 March 2017?
Kent House, 141 Faulkner Street, opposite Central Park
I’d recommend this video (Tony Seba’s Clean Disruption Keynote presentation at the Swedbank Nordic Energy Summit) explaining why clean power will dominate the market a lot sooner than is popularly believed.
The talk mentions a $5 billion investment in the grid-scale battery storage in Texas that becomes economic at US$350 per kWh of storage capacity – the price in March 2016 when he gave the talk.
Tony predicts that there won’t be any gas peaking power stations built in the US after 2020; soon after that gas peakers will become stranded assets.
He also discusses residential solar + battery storage which becomes disruptive as soon as the cost is less than the grid transmission cost, because then it’s cheaper to produce your own than buy it from the grid, even if the wholesale cost of fossil fuel power is zero. The projections show that it won’t be long before this happens!
Even though it’s a 53 minute presentation, it’s well worth watching – perhaps a few extracts could be shown at the meeting? Many people would be interested to know what’s inside the home battery storage systems!
Tony Seba’s Clean Disruption Keynote presentation at the Swedbank Nordic Energy Summit in Oslo, Norway, March 17th, 2016: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kxryv2XrnqM