CANBERRA: The Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA) says the Barcaldine solar farm in central western Queensland will provide about 10 per cent of the country’s large-scale solar electricity.
Work has begun on the $69 million 90-hectare solar project. ARENA is providing $22.8 million support towards the project’s construction and the Clean Energy Finance Corporation has committed $20 million in debt finance.
ARENA CEO Ivor Frischknecht said it would be huge. “To give you a sense, this is a 20 megawatt solar farm which is by far the biggest in Queensland to date and Australia-wide there’s a total of about 240 megawatts either under construction or installed, so that gives you a sense of scale,” he said.
“Well it’s a test case in multiple ways. Firstly just in the volume of projects, so if you have more projects the costs will come down. The other part that’s very interesting here is because it’s a regional area that does have some electricity reliability and voltage stability issues, this renewable project will help that.”
Mr Frischknecht said the Barcaldine Solar Project would be watched with interest. He said the potential for added battery storage to create additional network benefits would also be explored.
“This could allow the solar plant to work in tandem with the existing gas plant during a line outage, operating as an ‘island’ network independent to the main grid,” he said. “This project will serve as a test case showing how the network benefits from distributed renewable energy can improve network efficiency, and potentially enable solar plants to access an extra revenue stream through network support payments.”
