Great announcement and another VERY important brick in the wall...

Great announcement and another VERY important brick in the wall of our development.

This thread had some really fantastic factual information (looking at you Pro and some other regulars) and some absolute rubbish!

To make this project work in Darwin we need power and lots of it. Many may not know that Darwin isn't connected to the East Coast Grid and the NT power generation assets are fairly limited in size and power is expensive. Major projects are forced to provide their own power sources ie. Inpex.

Commentary here is right, we will need storage to utilise Sunpower's massive solar resource. This announcement suggests that we will be signing up for 200-300MW from Sunpower, typically this would be quoted on a 24/7 basis. This is FAR more than the company has previously advised that they would need (80 odd MW from memory).

This means that we will either building our own energy storage and averaging 80 odd MW out of our own battery or Sunpower will build the storage and we will be signing up for 200+ MW continuous out of Sunpower. If this is true the plant may have been significantly scaled up.

With a massive solar resource available from Sunpower providing cheap power (I'm hoping for sub $0.10 Kw/h) it would make commercial sence to build our own storage either Lithium or VRB.

To put some context around this Neon are currently building a 500MW / 1000MW/H lithium battery in NSW at an estimated cost of $300-400M. This battery would be extremely attractive to finance and would no doubt attract funding at desirable terms.

If our plant was still going to consume 80odd MW then this battery would power the plant for 12 hours a day while the sun wasn't shining. So you can see that energy storage is now very viable with a good renewable resource.

I'm really excited about the briefing next week, let's hope that Grant gets let off the leash a bit to answer our questions openly as he did in prior AMA's, but to be honest I can't really see him operating in any other way!