Evidence-first analysis of markets, grid systems, production climate, technology and the forecasts built over them. Historical record, current-state metrics and forward cases, with every figure named to its source.
Observed market structure, system operations and forward cases kept visibly separate from the record they are tested against.
A method-first guide to production and consumption accounting, operational and lifecycle factors, imports, storage, fuel-map coverage and revisions, with the exact publication gates used by Solar Analytica.
What an electrically isolated system teaches about distributed-asset visibility, minimum demand, evening ramps, coordinated storage and forecast accountability without pretending every SWIS threshold is globally portable.
A WA-led account of why distributed-solar value now depends on destination and timing: self-consumption, export, storage and curtailment, joined to current tariffs and a fixed distributed-asset baseline.
Five 2025 electricity systems show why annual wind-and-solar share, carbon intensity and usable operating flexibility are different measures that must be joined without being collapsed.
The first fixed monthly reference edition keeps annual context, operator records, distributed adoption and market-value evidence in separate, source-versioned lanes across the NEM and SWIS.
A frozen May 2026 baseline and transparent 2030 planning envelope for small-scale solar and distributed batteries in the public SWIS extent, with source lags, evidence limits and review triggers carried beside the range.
Energy Policy WA has seven proposals out for consultation on how distributed energy data is collected, verified and shared across the SWIS, with submissions closing 18 August 2026. On a grid where rooftop solar has met up to 80.8 per cent of daytime demand, data quality is the operating margin.
A fixed reference edition connecting Australian product eligibility, distributed adoption, grid operation, realised storage-market capture, regulated tariffs and forecast accountability, with quality declarations and verification boundaries published beside the evidence.
A July 2026 Ember analysis finds seven EU countries could connect about 25 gigawatts of new wind and solar without building any new grid, by co-locating it behind the connection points their existing hydropower plants already hold. That is roughly 18 per cent of the wind and solar those countries plan to add by 2030. The mechanism is not confined to Europe.
AEMO has published one data centre forecast and two shares for it: almost 10 per cent of underlying demand by 2050, and 12 per cent of grid-supplied consumption by FY50. The gap between the bases is mostly rooftop solar, and the share worth quoting depends on what the percentage is for.
Western Australia has put up to A$150 million in grant funding behind a 50 MW / 500 MWh ten-hour vanadium flow battery for the Goldfields. The tender closed on 20 July 2026 with no proponent named, no site confirmed and no total capital cost public. Read as a case study, the procurement shows how long-duration storage is chosen: on the duty the asset must do, and on the supply chain a government can own.
AEMO's ten-year SWIS planning case, kept explicitly separate from observed operations: a 347 MW forecast surplus in 2028-29, a shortfall from 2029-30, and coordinated household batteries entering the capacity model.
A reference edition for 246 local Western Australian energy markets: rooftop solar and battery adoption, household addressability, published network opportunities, and the operating record of an isolated grid. It makes one point plainly: SWIS is not one market.
Battery offtake contracts settle on perfect-foresight spread indices, and the gap between the index and reality has been a modelled claim until now. Computed from primary AEMO data across all 60 NEM bidirectional batteries in Q1 2026: the median full-quarter asset captured 46% of its duration-matched TBx index, the index ran 2.7x to 3.8x actual fleet energy revenue in every region, and one asset beat it.
Residential retail electricity prices across 92 cities and 70 countries, 2016 to 2025, read as the demand side of solar economics. A panel is worth its yield multiplied by the local price, so a subsidised tariff can outweigh strong sun: Cairo out-yields Berlin on sunlight yet returns roughly one-eleventh the annual value per kilowatt.
Global energy storage additions broke 100 GW for the first time, battery pack prices hit a record low, and Australia's Cheaper Home Batteries Program moved 400,000 systems in under a year. What the 2025 data says about where residential storage is heading.
Long-run climate evidence translated into yield, operating risk and the value of generation across 40 benchmark markets.
A 2026 Oceanography study finds that removing anthropogenic warming drops 70 of 71 recently bleached coral regions below moderate risk, while warming now outweighs a strong El Nino in 71 of 74 dual-signal regions. The observed record, modelled counterfactual and SSP3-7.0 projection remain explicitly separated.
A 7,083-run Caltech-Google ensemble finds positive tropical Pacific low-cloud feedback under warming and a materially stronger shortwave response in the combined +4 K and quadrupled-CO2 state. The result strengthens mechanism evidence without producing a new global climate-sensitivity estimate.
The annual synthesis of the whole series: nine variables, each at its latest reading. The 2026 headline is a contradiction: the climate has never been more demanding (2024 was the hottest year on record) yet solar has never been winning faster, becoming the largest single renewable at 8.7% of global electricity. Solar is scaling into exactly the climate that makes reading it correctly matter most.
The series' capstone: every climate variable joined to yield and tariff. Stacked and multiplied by the local price, they invert the map. Across the 23 priced markets, dim Berlin earns more per kilowatt than all but two, while sun-rich Riyadh ranks 21st and Cairo dead last. The tariff spread is 20 to 1; the sunlight spread is barely 2 to 1.
This part prices whether a system survives, not how much it produces. Across 40 markets, hail, the peril that breaks PV glass, seriously threatens only Johannesburg and Sydney; extreme wind governs 13 markets, flood 11, and five face no material hazard at all. The mount spec and the insurance reserve, not the annual kilowatt-hours, are where these storms are felt.
Wind hands back part of the heat penalty by scrubbing heat off the glass. Across 40 markets mean wind runs from a dead-still 1.8 m/s in Bogota to 6.3 in Cape Town, and because it barely tracks temperature (r = -0.09), it decides which hot markets get relief. Worth 3.6% to 6.9% of output versus still air, and the humid tropics, hot and windless at once, get none.
Eighteen measured market-events from grid operators, fleets and peer-reviewed studies: 27% off Sydney's rooftops in a day, 13.4% off California's worst fortnight, 9.5% across Black Summer's two months. Smoke is a recurring seasonal yield factor in exactly three regions, and a forecasting problem, not a resource problem, everywhere else.
The energy a dirty panel loses spans more than an order of magnitude across 40 markets: 1.5% a year in rain-washed Berlin, 5% in Perth, a 20% lower bound in the Gulf. The deciding variable is not how much dust falls but how often rain above a few millimetres follows it, and 17 markets carry honest blanks where no credible study exists.
Total sunlight tells you how much energy arrives, not what kind. Every kilowatt-hour is part sharp beam and part scattered diffuse light, and the ratio, not the total, decides whether a tracker or a bifacial module earns its price. The diffuse share runs from 19% on the Atacama plateau to 63% in Reykjavik: read that number before quoting a tracker.
No year delivers the quoted yield. Twenty-one years of NASA and NOAA driver data show why: El Nino and La Nina redistribute cloud across hemispheres, pushing the ocean index to a record +2.75 in 2015-16. Interannual irradiance variability runs from 2.5% in deserts to 8% in the monsoon, which is exactly what the P90 figure on a proposal is protecting you from.
Two independent NASA instruments across 40 markets: 26 skies brightened over two decades and 14 dimmed, from Berlin at +6.8% to Jodhpur at -6.1%, with the instruments agreeing on direction in 29 of 40. Every percent of sky moves output almost one for one, so the trend can dwarf the warming penalty: Berlin's brightening is roughly eight times its modelled heat drift.
Panels are rated at 25°C but run at a modelled 53°C in the average market, giving up 9.8% of nameplate to heat before climate change is counted. Twenty years of NASA record put the additional 25-year warming penalty at a third of a percent on average: the heat tax is large, the drift is a decimal, and the module choice is worth several times more.
Classification and scenario work for decisions where a single confident forecast would conceal more than it reveals.
Amendment 2 to AS/NZS 4777.2 took effect in August 2025 and permits bidirectional electric vehicle charging. It settles the case where the inverter sits on the wall and leaves the case where the inverter sits inside the car unresolved, which is the case much of the industry is building toward.
Industry roadmaps disagree by wide margins on 2030's cell-technology mix, and revise themselves within a single year. A low/base/high scenario model, aggregated from ITRPV, CPIA, Exawatt and NREL, built for procurement and capex planning rather than a single confident forecast.
Fifteen years of chemistry selection, safety certification and battery-management evolution, read as a classification framework for specifying and evaluating residential storage today: which chemistry, which certification stack, which BMS generation.