Australia grants A$900,000 for renewables study

The Australian government will grant A$900,000 to the University of Melbourne for a study on cost-effective abatement on electricity generation.

The minister for resources and energy, Martin Ferguson AM MP, said the A$1.2 million project entitled "Achieving Cost-effective Abatement from Australian Electricity Generation" will produce software modelling of Australia’s electricity market. It will assist on understanding how the National Energy Market might achieve the cheapest cuts in carbon emissions while using increased levels of renewable energy.

“The project will allow many thousands of simulated combinations of wind, solar and thermal power, with optimisation tools helping to find the lowest cost combination,” minister Ferguson said.

“Importantly, the project will see the development of open source modelling software to assess the performance of future energy systems, including transmission networks, under different levels of renewable energy penetration,"he said.

The software will be publicly available so that it can be used by researchers in academia or industry, allowing for scrutiny and refinement over time.

The project will commence on July 1, 2012 and is scheduled to end early 2015.

For more.