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.

Australian startup Okra Solar has taken out the champion prize for the “Hardware Battlefield” at the TechCrunch conference and VC meetup in Shenzhen in November.

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.

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.

Bett Asia 2020 will discuss the transformation of education and showcase innovative EduTech that looks to address Asian education challenges.

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.

METI and NEDO are calling for entries into the World Robot 2020 Summit by 31 August 2020. Entry categories include industrial robotics, service robotics, disaster robotics and junior robotics

Join Australian digital game companies for an exclusive games-focused market-ready bootcamp in Shanghai. Connect with global publishers and explore business opportunities in China.

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.

Participate in Austrade's webinar, the third in a series of 5 on India’s Agtech sector, will provide an insight into the dynamic disruption of conventional agriculture value chain from the perspective of a Venture Capital Fund.

Austrade invites your participation in an interactive webinar "Mongolia Mining 2020". In addition to an update on the impact of COVID-19, the webinar will provide valuable information on major mining projects in Mongolia and the market's business potential.

COVID-19 is affecting many e-commerce businesses and how consumers shop online. In this difficult time, many brick-and-mortar retailers are watching foot traffic and sales drop to near zero.

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).

This week at the Assembly of the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA), political and business leaders from around the world outlined the far-reaching geopolitical implications of an energy transformation driven by the rapid growth of renewable energy.

The San Francisco-based utility is under investigation for any role its equipment might have played in the deadly wildfires of late 2018, only one year after getting blamed for an earlier, devastating rash of blazes.

While it’s well known that corporations were some of the earliest trailblazers of large-scale renewable energy purchasing — they’ve closed over 14 gigawatts of deals in the past six years, according to tracking by Rocky Mountain Institute’s Business Renewables Center — higher education has also made impressive strides. In fact, a report released last fall showed that the top 30 renewable energy-buying universities are using around 3 billion kilowatt-hours of green power annually. That’s enough to power 276,000 homes.

GE Renewable Energy and Future Wind said this week that they have signed an agreement to install the first Haliade-X 12-MW wind turbine prototype in Maasvlakte-Rotterdam this summer. The deal includes five years of testing and a 15-year full service Operation and Maintenance agreement.

Global funding for clean-energy projects sagged in 2018 after China’s decision to curb subsidies dragged down installations in the world’s biggest solar market.

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.

Utilities and renewable-energy advocates have long had a complicated relationship. Yet the prospect of PG&E Corp. tipping into bankruptcy by the end of January has sent shivers through the solar-and-wind sector.

EIA expects non-hydroelectric renewable energy resources such as solar and wind will be the fastest growing source of U.S. electricity generation for at least the next two years. EIA’s January 2019 Short-Term Energy Outlook (STEO) forecasts that electricity generation from utility-scale solar generating units will grow by 10 percent in 2019 and by 17 percent in 2020. According to the January STEO, wind generation will grow by 12 percent and 14 percent during the next two years. EIA forecasts total U.S. electricity generation across all fuels will fall by 2 percent this year and then show very little growth in 2020.

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.

A California incubator that houses and nurtures clean-energy startups is expanding into venture capital.

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.

Corporations signing PPAs with renewable energy power producers have been on the rise for quite some time but in 2018, the group as a whole purchased more than double the clean energy they purchased in 2017.

Facebook Inc. is boosting its clean-energy efforts with a deal to help run a Virginia data center where it leases space with solar power.

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.

Hundreds of young activists stormed Nancy Pelosi’s office after Democrats won the House in November, inspired by the new hero of the left, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who briefly joined them in a live-streamed protest to demand passage of a radical plan to fight climate change.

PG&E Corp. is seeking court protection to amend or cancel power purchase agreements with suppliers as part of its bankruptcy proceedings.

The global strategy for mitigating climate change is no secret. Most countries have embarked on an initiative to transition to clean energy sources. According to a study by scientists from the universities of Oxford and Utrecht, we will almost certainly pass a point of no return for dealing with global warming if governments worldwide don’t transition away from fossil fuels, such as coal and natural gas, towards renewable energy by 2035. This would mean that renewables would need to see their total share of power generation increase by at least two percent per year.

Over the past year, U.S. Wind got calls “every day” to sell a lease the energy company bought for $1 million in 2015 in its push to build a wind farm off the New Jersey coast.

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.

According to an analysis by the SUN DAY Campaign of data just released by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), natural gas dominated new electrical generating capacity in 2018. However, renewable energy sources (i.e., biomass, geothermal, hydropower, solar, wind) seem poised to swamp fossil fuels as new generating capacity is added over the next three years.

Sempra Renewables jointly owns all of part of seven wind farms and one battery installation in seven states. 

The first blade has been manufactured for the 714 MW offshore windfarm East Anglia One in the UK.

This week, Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti announced that rather than investing in the Haynes, Harbor and Scattergood natural gas power plants to meet the requirements of a 2010 law related to a practice known as once through cooling, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP) will phase them out in favor of renewable energy.

Global commissioning of onshore wind turbines declined 3 percent in 2018, partly due to a slowdown in India and Germany. Growth is expected to bounce back in 2019, with a 32 percent jump to 60 GW.

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.

This week ComEd said that it’s furthering innovation in Chicago’s Bronzeville neighborhood with the installation of renewable energy powered lights along the walkway to the Beethoven Elementary School. Bronzeville is home to the first “microgrid cluster” in the United States.

Plenty of people, it seems, have plans for PG&E Corp. Even before the California utility giant filed for bankruptcy facing $30 billion in potential liabilities from wildfires, state regulators began studying whether it needed to be reformed, restructured or even taken over by the government. They asked interested parties -- city officials, unions, consumer groups and trade associations -- to chime in.

The California-based utility requested that a federal bankruptcy court prevent FERC from enforcing the conditions of the more than 380 power purchase agreements (PPAs) that the utility may want to exit under its Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing.

South Africa plans to expand use of renewable power as the coal-dependent nation expects traditional, centralized generation plants to “disappear,” Energy Minister Jeff Radebe said.