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The nature of the increasingly ageing populations of developed countries places residential issues of these populations at the heart of urban policy. Retirement villages as housing options for older adults in Australia has been growing steadily in recent years; however, there have been a dearth of geographical studies looking into the distribution of existing retirement villages at the regional level. This study aims to reveal the geographical distributions and cluster patterns of retirement villages in the Greater Brisbane Region of Australia to better understand and serve the living requirements of current and potential retirement village residents. The geovisualization method was adopted to visually explore the distribution patterns of retirement villages. The Global Moran’s I and Local Moran’s I measures were employed to analyze the spatial correlation and the clusters of retirement villages in the study region. The study revealed that distribution of retirement villages was not random (z-score = 7.11; p < 0.001), but clustered in nature and included hotspot patterns, especially along the coastline and Brisbane River areas. Moreover, for-profit and not-forprofit retirement villages have different distribution patterns and adopted significantly different tenure agreements. In the study region, the spatial distribution of retirement villages aligns with the aggregation trend of older residents. The findings of this study disclosed the spatial distribution patterns of retirement villages and will provide developers and policymakers with geographically referenced data for the choice of new development sites to meet the market demand of potential customers, forming aged-friendly development strategies, and eventually leading to improved quality of life for older Australians. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to evaluate the role of residential battery storage in addressing network barriers to the further adoption of household photovoltaics, by presenting a unique perspective combining a housing and network techno-economic evaluation. Stochasticity in demand and weather inputs are modelled using Monte Carlo and a power flow model is constructed of a test area of the low-voltage (LV) network. Findings include: that batteries address voltage drop issues on LV networks at photovoltaic penetration rates of 50% and over and can mitigate voltage rise issues at PV penetration rates up to 75%. Economically, under Queensland conditions, household gains are marginal with optimal results provided by charging batteries from photovoltaic generation only and a minimum array size of 5 kW. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Australia has one of the highest rates of residential photovoltaics penetration in the world. The willingness of households to privately invest in energy infrastructure, and the maturing of battery technology, provides significant scope for more efficient energy networks. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the scope for promoting distributed generation and storage from within existing network spending. In this paper, a techno-economic analysis is conducted to evaluate the economic impacts on networks of private investment in energy infrastructure. A highly granular probabilistic model of households within a test area was developed and an economic evaluation of both household and network sectors performed. Results of this paper show that PV only installations carry the greatest private return and, at current battery prices, the economics of combined PV and battery systems is marginal. However, when network benefits arising from reducing residential evening peaks, improved reliability, and losses avoided are considered, this can more than compensate for private economic losses. The main conclusion of this paper is that there is significant scope for network benefits in retrofitting existing housing stock through the incentivization of a policy of a more rapid adoption of distributed generation and residential battery storage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]