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Australia’s largestsolar farm comes online

The first stage of Australia’slargest solar development went live on Thursday, in a boost to the economy’sambitious energy transition goals undermined by the sluggish pace of newdevelopments.

The New England solar farm is being developed in two stages, withthe first 400MW of storage now completed. Developers ACEN Australia said theyare confident of beginning work on the remaining 320MW quickly.

ACEN Australia CEO Anton Rohner said the first stagedevelopment, costing about $650 million, demonstrated Australia’s rapidtransition away from fossil fuels.

“I truly believe that the work ACEN Australia is doing toaccelerate Australia’s transition to a renewable energy future is here and now– and it starts with New England Solar,” Mr Rohner said.

Mr Rohner said the Australian Energy Market Operator in Decemberapproved the solar project to begin transmitting zero emission energy into thegrid, but the project had until now been in testing to ensure sufficient gridstability. The project will export its maximum capacity of 400MW to the gridwithin the next few months, Mr Rohner said

ACEN Australia will then turn itsattention to a final investment decision on stage two of the project, but MrRohner said early indications are it will proceed.

“We are reasonably confident. We already have the connectionissues sorted, it is just sorting out the appropriate terms of construction,”Mr Rohner told The Australian Financial Review.

The expansion, however, would come at a time of labour shortagesand soaring inflation, which Mr Rohner said would increase costs on aper-megawatt basis by between 20 per cent and 30 per cent for stage two.

Still, Australia can ill-afford not to move quickly ondeveloping new renewable energy projects amid heightened concerns that new zeroemission sources are not being developed fast enough to compensate for the retirement of fossil fuel generators.

The federal Labor government has made accelerating renewableenergy generation a central focus of its policy agenda. It has set anaggressive target of having zero-emission sources make up more than 80 per cent of Australia’s electricity mix by 2030, which would allow the country to meet its net zero by 2050 target.

Despite the policy support, new renewable energy projects havebeen slowed by local opposition and supply constraints, and some prominentenergy experts insist the government will need to strike deals with majorfossil fuel generators to slow future retirements.

Origin Energy is expected to come under mounting pressure todelay the planned closure of its giant NSW coal power station in 2025 as otherkey energy transition projects – most notably the troubled Snowy 2.0 pumpedhydro project – run late.

Renewable energy proponents insist Australia will accelerate thedevelopment of zero emission generation with the right policy settings, andthere is a growing pipeline of international heavyweights all committing tomajor works.

ACEN, which is owned by the Philippines-based Ayala Group, hasabout 8GW of renewable energy generation and storage capacity in itsdevelopment pipeline in Australia. About 1GW of this is already underconstruction, including a 400MW solar farm in NSW’s proposed Central-West OranaRenewable Energy Zone.