The Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA) announced on Friday completion of Emu Downs Solar Farm, which is located approximately 200 kilometres north of Perth and 30 kilometres east of Cervantes.
An APA Group project, the 20-megawatt solar farm is comprised of 75,000 solar panels and was constructed adjacent to APA’s 80MW Emu Downs Wind Farm in order to complement the site’s wind resources.
“You’ve got the profile of the wind in the morning, which dips in the middle of the day, and you’ve got the solar picking up in the middle of the day. It fits in really nicely,” says APA Group’s Adam Pegg.
The wind farm’s existing transmission connection infrastructure is being used for the new PV facility, with only minor upgrades required to made to the existing substation.
It’s taken under a year to get the solar farm operational, with construction starting in April 2017. Electricity generated by the facility and its associated large-scale certificates (LGCs) will be bought by Synergy out to 2030 under a power purchase agreement struck in 2016.
Emu Downs is the first of 12 large scale solar farms to be completed that received funding under ARENA’s $92 million competitive round in 2016 – and is also the first co-located wind and solar farm in Western Australia 1 .
“APA’s Emu Downs Solar Farm marks the beginning of a quick succession of our large scale solar farms reaching completion this year, injecting $1.1 billion into solar PV,” said ARENA CEO Ivor Frischknecht.
ARENA says the funding round was the catalyst for large-scale solar energy really getting into gear in Australia, pushing prices down and boosting investor confidence. Some large-scale solar projects are now being built without government funding as a result.
Mr. Frischknecht stated there was only 10MW of large-scale solar in Australia just six years ago2. By the end of this year, there will be more than 1800 MW in place, with over 10 GW capacity in the pipeline.
Among those projects is another APA Group development – the 110-megawatt Darling Downs Solar Farm, which is located approximately 40 kilometres from Dalby in Queensland. That development is being supported by a $20 million grant from ARENA. Darling Downs is expected to be operational by the end of this year.
Footnotes
- The first solar farm to be co-located with a wind facility was the 10MW Gullen Range solar farm in Crookwell, NSW, which was officially opened last month ↩
- Australia’s first large scale PV facility was the 10MW Greenough River solar farm, also in Western Australia, which was opened in 2012. That facility is to be expanded to 40MW ↩
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What does the N stand for in ARENA?
Nergy.