Events in Spring 2026 - updates and reactions

The All Energy Conference was on between 28-29 October, which is the major Renewable Energy Conference of the year, with many speakers. We may get a report on that later.

On 28th October, the Melbourne Energy Institute held a day long free Symposium 26 at Melbourne Uni, where researchers presented on their projects. 

There was also an environmental film festival on 25-28 October at Queen Victoria Women’s Centre in Melbourne.

I visited the poster display at Symposium 26 - a few photos of posters that I found of interest are below

The first two are relevant to proposed off shore wind, one is about recreating some of the sea floor conditions (particularly habitat for fish species), the second is about the stability of turbines

As I have recently been reading Thea Roifrancos Extraction, which looks at the processes of obtaining resources for the "green capitalism" that is producing much of our renewable energy, I was interested in the following poster about recovering metals from lithium-ion batteries

Producing enough energy from renewables to meet Melbourne's demand in winter is a challenge. The following poster looked at the most reliable areas for wind energy on land in winter nights (it is generally suggested that offshore wind will be the most reliable - ultimately I don't know how much we will rely on onshore wind, but it will be a while before offshore wind is producing)

We hear a lot about solar building materials in the future - the poster below looks at coatings for windows to concentrate solar. I didn't discuss this one and haven't read it in detail yet, so I'm not sure if these windows will all be red and how that will work!

Finally here is one on loadshifting - some interesting observations on who does or does not shift their energy load to take advantage of solar in the daytime and under what conditions. So far, this is pre the 'three hours of free power' but it will be relevant to that when it begins.

There were many more of course, this is just a sample of ones that I found interesting and relevant to some of our discussions.