Renewables are cheap. So why isn’t your power bill falling?

Steve Tritton/Shutterstock Tony Wood, Grattan InstitutePower prices are set to go up again even though renewables now account for 40% of the electricity in Australia’s main grid – close to quadruple the clean power we had just 15 years ago. How can that be, given renewables are the cheapest form of newly built power generation? This is a fair question. As Australia heads for a federal election campaign likely to focus on the rising cost of living, many of us are wondering when, exactly, cheap renewables will bring cheap power. The simple answer is – not yet. While solar and wind farms produce power at remarkably low cost, they need to be built where it’s sunny or windy. Our existing transmission lines link gas and coal power stations to cities. Connecting renewables to the grid requires expensive new transmission lines, as well as storage for when the wind isn’t blowing or the sun isn’t shining. Notably, Victoria’s mooted price increase of 0.7% was much lower than other states, which would be as high as 8.9% in parts of New South Wales. This is due to Victoria’s influx of renewables – and good connections to other states. Because Victoria can draw cheap wind from South Australia, hydroelectricity from Tasmania or coal power from New South Wales through a good transmission line network, it has kept wholesale prices...

Read More........→March 22, 2025

Scientists Turn Industrial Waste into Batteries for Storing Renewable Energy

Emily Mahoney, the new paper’s first author, in the lab – courtesy Malapit LabA team at Northwestern University has transformed an industrial waste product into a battery for storing sustainable energy.While many iterations of these batteries are in production or being researched for grid-scale applications, using a waste molecule, in this case, triphenylphosphine oxide, (TPPO) has never been done before.The batteries used in our phones, devices, and even cars rely on metals like lithium and cobalt, sourced through intensive and sometimes exploitative mining operations. Demand for these critical minerals is expected to skyrocket over the next few decades.At the same time, thousands of tons of the well-known chemical byproduct TPPO are produced each year by many organic industrial synthesis processes, including the production of vitamin supplements, but it is rendered useless and must be carefully discarded following production.In a paper published last week in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, a ‘one-pot’ reaction allows chemists to turn TPPO into a usable product with the powerful potential to store energy, opening the door for the future viability of a long-imagined battery type called “redox flow” batteries.“Battery research has traditionally been dominated by engineers and materials scientists,” said Northwestern...

Read More........→January 16, 2025