The US defence market remains the world’s largest and can be a lucrative export market for Australian industry.

The second China International Import Expo (CIIE) attracted a record number of Australian companies and generated more than $350 million worth of trade deals for exporters.

Developers across Asia are seeking innovative solutions to help them create more liveable and environmentally sustainable cities, opening up opportunities for Australian designers, constructors and building operators.

South Australia Minister for Trade, Tourism and Investment, David Ridgway, recently hosted a roundtable in Guangzhou to promote the state’s newly launched Landing Pad program.

Queensland-based Capricornia Contact Lens has signed a 10-year strategic distribution agreement with one of China’s leading pharmaceutical and medical equipment distributers, Shenzhen Relin Medicine.

View a listing of all the 'Latest from Austrade' articles for 2020.

Australian miners had a strong presence at this year’s Investing in African Mining Indaba, the world’s largest mining investment event, now in its 26th year.

Indonesian Business & Charter Aviation Summit (IBCAS) 2020 is an annual conference and exhibition for Business and Charter Aviation organised by Avcon Group.

IOWA AgTech 2 week immersion program 24 August – 4 September.

Join Austrade's webinar to gain insights on the Bangladesh E-commerce market, emerging trends, growth drivers, regulations, route to market and opportunities for partnering with Bangladesh online companies.

What does 2020 and beyond hold for your company's global growth plans? How will COVID-19 disrupt and create new supply chains and R&D hubs in the APAC region?

Austrade welcomes you to US market entry resources & opportunities for Australian AgriTech companies in the US market featuring Cassandra Keener (Chicago), Joanna Olivera (San Francisco) and David Brown (Landing Pads SF).

The fallout from California power giant PG&E Corp.’s looming bankruptcy has been both sudden and widespread: Its electricity suppliers have seen their debt cut to junk. Banks are facing liabilities as buyers of last resort for more than $760 million of bonds the utility issued through California. And the rest of the state’s utilities have tumbled.

On January 14, 2019, California’s largest utility, PG&E, filed a bankruptcy notice stating that it plans to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy by the month end on January 29th. Given its business situation, PG&E must proceed with the bankruptcy process unless lawmakers step in because PG&E’s current liabilities from California’s 2017 and 2018 fires are about 10 times PG&E’s current market cap of $3.5 billion, which is down 90% since last Fall. Obviously, this is a big issue for the cleantech industry since PG&E covers a territory that runs from Eureka to Bakersfield, including 106,000 miles of electric grid.

This week Siemens Gamesa said it signed its third contract in so many years with Voltalia in Brazil to supply wind turbines for wind farms the company is building.

GE announced today that it sees a future in housing its renewable generation businesses (onshore and offshore wind, hydropower) alongside its grid businesses which include substations and transformers plus solar, storage and distributed energy resource (DER) control software. GE Renewable Energy CEO Jerome Pecresse said in a press conference that the move will simplify the lives of GE’s customers by giving them one point of contact for all of their renewable energy power needs.

Analysts at Huajin Securities in China said they expect newly installed capacity nationwide for 2018 to be somewhere between 21 and 22 GW, and that the wind power curtailment rate would continue to drop. Newly installed capacity for wind power is expected to continue to grow steadily over the next two years, while the proportion of the country’s total power sourced from wind is expected to continue to increase as well.

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez released a sweeping package of environmental measures Thursday that has pitted progressives in the House Democratic caucus against moderates over how far to go in pursuit of resetting the climate change debate.

Australian hydrogen infrastructure developer H2U confirmed today that it will use Baker Hughes NovaLT gas turbine generators at its South Australian Renewable Hydrogen and Ammonia Supply Chain Demonstrator in Port Lincoln.

The 2019 Sustainable Energy in America factbook was released this week by Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BloombergNEF) and the Business Council for Sustainable Energy (BCSE). The factbook highlights a number of key trends in sustainable and renewable energy growth, emissions and jobs in the sector. Take a glance at the six charts below to learn more.

The Jackson Smart Energy District aims to achieve the parent firm’s 2040 clean energy goals some 15 to 20 years earlier. Those goals include producing 40 percent of the district’s energy needs from on-site renewable sources.

Unusually still weather in the upper Midwest and Great Plains in late 2018 has already taken a bite out of earnings at NextEra Energy Inc. and Avangrid Inc., which both operate large wind farms. Other wind generators have yet to report fourth-quarter results, including Pattern Energy Group Inc., TerraForm Power Inc. and Clearway Energy Inc.

Instead of a wall, build a first-of-its-kind energy park that spans the 1,954 miles of the border between the United States and Mexico to bring energy, water, jobs and border security to the region.

What happens when a famously left-leaning city dives into the buttoned-down business of electric utilities? San Francisco may soon find out.

The U.S Jones Act affects the construction of U.S. offshore wind farms by limiting certain activities in U.S. waters to U.S.-registered vessels owned and operated by qualified U.S. citizens. Much of the expertise in the construction of offshore wind farms is European based. The logical mechanism for marrying European expertise with U.S. firms qualified to operate where the U.S. Jones Act applies are joint ventures. Such joint ventures must take into account the stringent U.S. citizenship requirements applicable to the ownership and operation of Jones Act vessels.

Amazon.com announced today that it plans to purchase the energy produced by three new renewable energy projects as part of its long-term goal to power all Amazon Web Services (AWS) global infrastructure with renewable energy. These projects – a 91.2-MW wind farm in Donegal Ireland, a 91-MW wind farm in Bäckhammar, Sweden, and a 47-MW wind farm in Tehachapi, California – will deliver an expected 670,000 megawatt-hours (MWh) of renewable energy annually.

Recently there has been a great deal of interest in a ‘Green New Deal’ for the United States. It is seen as a way to solve pressing environmental, employment and economic problems with a single comprehensive plan. Modeled on Roosevelt’s New Deal, which created jobs, invested in large infrastructure projects, and pulled the US out of the Great Depression, the Green New Deal is a modern version of that program, but with green energy investments, 21st century job training, and deficit reduction as the key components.

Nevada is joining the growing list of U.S. places that aim to ban fossil fuels from its electricity supply.

This week global energy and infrastructure group, Eversheds Sutherland, announced that it helped Ball Corporation secure two virtual power purchase agreements (VPPAs) – one wind and one solar – for a total of 388 MW of new renewable energy. According to Ball, these agreements will allow the company to power 100 percent of its corporate, packaging and aerospace operations electricity load in North America with renewable energy by the end of 2021.

Turns out the best place to install a small turbine in the U.S. isn’t the Plains, where winds blow the strongest, but the Northeast where the incentives are better.

Global energy powerhouse Siemens is to undergo a fundamental transformation by spinning off its gas and power divisions into a new entity which will also comprise its stake in windpower firm Siemens Gamesa.

This week in Seattle, Washington, Senate Bill 5116 was signed into law in by Governor Jay Inslee after passing the state legislature earlier this month. This bill cuts out coal power by 2025 and requires an equitable transition to 100 percent clean electricity for the entire state by 2045.

This week, diversified real estate acquisition and development firm Commercial Development Company and transmission developer Anbaric said they plan to build a renewable energy center at Brayton Point Commerce Center in Somerset, Massachusetts. The site is the former home of the Brayton Point Coal Plant, the cooling towers for which were demolished two weeks ago. (video of demolition at the end of article at this link).

Renewables firm Pangea Energy and vanadium battery producer CellCube have signed on to build a 50MW storage system alongside a solar farm in South Australia.

On Thursday this week, Mayor Steven Fulop welcomed EnBW North America to Jersey City in a ribbon-cutting ceremony. New Jersey Economic Development Authority Senior Vice President Brian Sabina and others gathered to officially open the German subsidiary’s first U.S. office and marking its entrance into the competitive New Jersey/New York offshore wind market.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s surprise victory in Australia’s election was a win for the coal industry and ensures the debate about tackling climate change will continue to polarize the nation.

Oil companies, automakers and consumer products manufacturers will unleash a campaign for a U.S. tax on carbon dioxide emissions even though it may lead to higher prices for their products.

A number of recent announcements highlight just how quickly and aggressively the U.S. offshore wind industry is growing in the Northeast. States are enacting offshore wind target capacity laws and initiatives and companies are setting up offices in the region and making strategic hires so they can participate in what will soon be a booming industry.

According to an analysis by the SUN DAY Campaign of data just released by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), U.S. electrical generating capacity by renewable energy sources (i.e., biomass, geothermal, hydropower, solar, wind) has now - for the first time - surpassed that of coal.

In April 2019, in the heart of coal country, Indiana regulators rejected a proposal by its electric and gas utility, Vectren, to replace baseload coal plants with a new $900 million, 850 megawatt (MW) natural gas-fired power plant. Regulators were concerned that with the dramatic decline in the cost of renewable energy, maturation of energy storage and rapidly changing customer demand, such a major gas plant investment could become a stranded, uneconomic asset in the future. Regulators are now pushing Vectren to consider more decentralized, lower-carbon resources such as wind, solar and storage that would offer greater resource diversity, flexibility and cost effectiveness.

Fossil fuels, long regarded for their high-energy return on investment, are not as efficient as once thought. In fact, their final yields are not much better than those of renewable options, according to a new study.

Steve Sawyer, 63, Senior Policy Advisor and former Secretary General of the Global Wind Energy Council, passed away on July 31, 2019 of a sudden and aggressive lung cancer.

The Trump administration cast the fate of the nation’s first major offshore wind farm into doubt by extending an environmental review for the $2.8 billion Vineyard Wind project off Massachusetts.

The Clean Energy Regulator of Australia has approved enough capacity to guarantee that the large-scale Renewable Energy Target of 33,000 GWh of additional renewable energy will be met in 2020.

France’s Neoen SA has outlined plans to build a giant renewables complex in South Australia, including battery storage with up to nine times more capacity than the Tesla Inc. design at its nearby Hornsdale plant, which is billed as the world’s largest lithium-ion battery.

Striso is a digital instrument with pressure-sensitive buttons that plays a variety of acoustic-like sounds.  Read more...