Blog

Our insights on the renewable energy industry and its impacts on the community and environment.

Today is 18 September 2024 and that’s an important date for Sunshine Hydro. Today, I and the team at Sunshine Hydro will remember my first visit to Wivenhoe Power Station ten years ago with gratitude, and celebrate the many ways we have made the impossible possible.
Following the announcement of $2/kg Hydrogen Production Tax Incentive (HPTI), the Treasury ran a public consultation about the scheme. As often is the case, the devil is in the detail and the careful planning of this subsidy is paramount to avoid unintended adverse consequences to the Australian energy transition and leakage of subsidies outside of Australian borders.
There’s been lots of discussion lately about nuclear power and its role in a future Australian grid. In a recent Investor Q&A Webinar for our equity crowdfunding campaign on Birchal, we were asked if we see nuclear power as a threat to our Superhybrid™ business model. That question inspired me to write this blog.  
The first tender shoots of the idea for this company started when I was living in a sustainable community. The community needed energy storage and I started looking at how that might be done. First I envisaged a micro pumped hydro station. However, the more I explored these ideas, the bigger things became and the possibilities of what could be achieved increased. It soon became clear that I needed a company with like-minded individuals to carry this forward, and so Sunshine Hydro was born.
In an era where public sentiment leans heavily toward acknowledging First Nations peoples and righting historical wrongs, the question that often emerges is: "What can businesses do to make a tangible difference?" While public support for indigenous communities is high on both sides of the referendum debate, concrete steps and real actions are what matter.
Ship at sea image by Valentin Schönpos from Pixabay
While we can’t predict what will cause the next energy crisis, we can be quite confident that one will arise, probably rather sooner than later. Most people will not expect it to happen until it does and will call it “unprecedented” – the new favourite word as record weather events and natural disasters occur weekly in global news.
Technology and economics as ‘how’ we will bring our vision to life. Community and environment are ‘why’ we will bring it to life. Or, more broadly, ‘why’ we are in business. Like in all organisations, ‘why’ is where the passion lies.
The world is facing a perfect storm with scarcity driving up fossil fuel prices just as we need to urgently address our carbon emission targets. So it’s not surprising a debate has developed in Australia about the pros and cons of nuclear power.
Hydro Tasmania gets it when it comes to deep storage — well, kind of, and we’ll get to that later.  But they do certainly understand one of the key values of deep storage.  In a paper prepared by Tas Hydro for ARENA, they find that...
An International Government-led coalition calls for urgent action on pumped storage hydropower. ‘Get used to blackouts’ or risk reverting to fossil fuels is the warning, unless the world scales up investment in water batteries to support fast-growing solar and wind power...