The Australian wheat belt could soon have Australia’s largest solar farm under the company Sun Brilliance according to Perth Now.
Professor Roy Willis, the company director, said the $160 million project would build a 100-megawatt solar farm on a 165 hectares of farmland 2 kilometres of Cunderdin. This would make it the biggest solar farm in Western Australia by size and the biggest in Australia, according to output, producing 20% more electricity than the Nyngan Solar farm in New South Wales.
Sun Brilliance originally planned only to build a 25-megawatt solar farm, but the company decided to make it 4x bigger because of the rising wholesale electricity and the interests of investors. Western Australia’s biggest existing solar farms are the 10.6-megawatt facility at the Degrussa copper mine and the 10-megawatt Greenough River solar power plant.
Professor Willis has stated that Sun Brilliance had applied to connect to Western Power’s grid, the South-West Interconnected System, and proposed to build its own substation on the plant site that is parallel to the installation of the solar power plant. Professor Willis said that the farm could potentially generate more than 200-gigawatt hours of renewable energy every year and creating 200,000 large Generation Certificates.
Kalwart Dhillon, Sun Brilliance chief financial officer said that the company had not sought assistance from the Australian Renewable Energy Agency. He said that the project partners were in final negotiations with a number of investors for 30% equity investment, and also several lenders for 70% debt, with a financial closure expected in this coming December. The company hopes the construction would start in January of Next year and will be operational by July.
The state government is a big supporter of renewable energy and Western Australia continues to lead the way. The government is funding the Renewable Energy Buyback Scheme and the Residential Feed-in tariff, which have driven the big growth in rooftop solar installation across Western Australia.
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