Category: Highlights

Australia’s Clean Energy Council (CEC) says in a newly published paper that large-scale battery energy storage has become the best way to spread energy generated by solar and wind throughout any day, and to instantly respond to peak energy needs in the National Electricity Market (NEM) for long and short durations. The paper compares the levelized cost of energy delivered by a new 250 MW gas peaker plant with 250 MW four-hour and two-hour grid-scale batteries. It finds that overall – when various costs are calculated – that the batteries are 17%…

Read More

China has admitted its Covid vaccines do not work well – which could explain why Chile is suffering a resurgence despite having one of the best rollouts in the world. In an extremely rare confession, the head of the Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention, Gao Fu, said the jabs ‘don’t have very high protection rates’ against coronavirus symptoms. They are being used in at least 45 countries. He gave no specific details, but a University of Chile study found China’s CoronaVac jab was only 3 per cent effective in the 28…

Read More

The Biden administration is stepping up scrutiny of China’s plans for a digital yuan, with some officials concerned the move could kick off a long-term bid to topple the dollar as the world’s dominant reserve currency, according to people familiar with the matter. Now that China’s digital-currency efforts are gathering momentum, officials at the Treasury, State Department, Pentagon and National Security Council are bolstering their efforts to understand the potential implications, the people said. American officials are less worried about an immediate challenge to the current structure of the global…

Read More

DUBAI: Mumbai-headquartered Larsen & Toubro (L&T) has secured a contract to build the Sudair solar PV project in Saudi Arabia. The renewables arm of L&T’s Power Transmission and Distribution business has bagged the turnkey engineering, procurement, and construction contract for the Riyadh plant, which has a total capacity of 1.5 gigawatts – the biggest in the world. “The project that is coming up in Riyadh Province has a 30.8 square kilometre land parcel available to install a total capacity of 1.5GW PV Solar modules with associated single axial tracker and inverters,”…

Read More

A year after the COVID-19 pandemic, the construction sector has shown robust growth and contributed to the revival of economic activity in Pakistan. The housing and real estate activity has taken off on the back of an incentive package and low-cost housing projects announced by the government. Till October last year, a total of 127 projects had been registered at an estimated cost of Rs.63 billion to avail the scheme. In addition, a further 114 projects worth around Rs.109 billion were also under the process of being registered. Economic revival…

Read More