Harnessing the potential of Australia’s renewables boom

The recent boom in large-scale renewable energy projects in Australia has seen 6400MW of capacity come online between 2017 and 2019. And there are no signs of it slowing. But sitting behind this good news story is a challenge for energy markets: how to best put this new resource to work in a market that’s been traditionally geared toward buying and selling flat blocks of power. That works for coal and gas fired generation, but less so for large scale solar plants that ramp up then down every day as the sun moves across the sky. To meet this challenge, in 2018 we joined forces with retailer ERM Power to design something new; a fresh hedging idea in the form of a firm solar contract that actually works with renewable providers, rather than in spite of them.