ARDR STORY
Solar watershed?
January/February 2015 - Large-scale solar projects are still scarce in Australia, even as AGL Energy Limited and First Solar have completed Australia's two largest solar photovoltaic (PV) plants, the 102 megawatt (MW) Nyngan and 53 MW Broken Hill solar power plants in NSW.
Over the next 30 years, they will together produce approximately 360,000 megawatt hours (MWh) of renewable energy per year.
Getting the projects off the ground still required a substantial public investment, with $166 million contributed by the Australian Government through the Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA) and another $64.9 million coming from the NSW Government.
But it is only the start of large-scale solar in Australia, according to Jack Curtis, First Solar's regional manager for the Asia Pacific. He believes that through the substantial and sustained cost reductions in the solar industry and the lessons learnt at projects like Nyngan and Broken Hill, "it is inevitable that utility-scale solar projects in Australia will compete on an unsubsidised basis, in the near future".
This is a view shared by less conflicted parties, including the CO2CRC, which in a recent report projected that because of the learning-by-doing effect wind and large-scale solar options will become cost-competitive with established fossil fuels based technologies by 2030.
In terms of production capacity, Australia has still a long way to go before any of our projects match the scale of the largest solar plants in the world: Charanka Solar Park in India with 600 MW, and several solar plants in the US are each boasting more than 400 MW in maximum electricity output.
This will also not significantly change with the $100 million ARENA is about to invest in new solar projects. Of the 22 projects selected to the full application stage, only Origin Energy's Darling Downs Solar Farm project would have a maximum output of more than 100 MW.
However, in terms of total capacity installed in Australia, there is rapid progress. According to the Australian PV Institute, the total installed solar PV capacity in Australia reached around 4.8 gigawatt, with almost all of this capacity established since 2010.
Another significant project came online in March.
The Moree Solar Farm, developed by Fotowatio Renewable Ventures (FRV) and supported with $101.7 million from ARENA, has a capacity of 56 MW and is expected to generate 140,000 MWh per year over its operational life of 30 years.
Australia is following a global trend, as revealed by data from the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA).
The rapid rise of global installed solar PV capacity is shown in the figure for the years up to 2013; it also reveals that most of the growth is now in Asia, while other markets, notably Europe, appear to stabilise.
