Another Big Oil solar farm starts sending power to Queensland grid

The 214MW (dc) Woolooga solar farm developed by Lightsource BP in Lower Wonga in Queensland is starting to send small amounts of much needed cheap solar power to the grid in Queensland.

Lightsource BP, the solar joint venture controlled by one of the world’s biggest oil companies, has been busy in Australia over the past year, building Woolooga and the West Wyalong solar farm in New South Wales, while also advancing plans for a further 400MW solar and battery project near Goulburn in NSW.

In September of last year, the company committed to grow its global solar portfolio six fold to 25GW by 2025, including a quadrupling of its Australian portfolio to 2GW over the same time frame.

Construction of Woolooga began in June of 2021, and early signs of output from the project have been captured by Paul McArdle from Global Roam, which provides our popular NEM Watch widget.

It follows the switching on earlier this year of the Gangarri solar farm, also in Queensland, owned by another Big Oil company Shell in September last year. Shell, BP and French oil giant Total all have major wind and solar ambitions in Australia and elsewhere.

The solar farm consists of three sites, collectively known as “Woolooga North” and “Woolooga South” on around 500 hectares of land in Queensland’s Gympie region that has mainly been used for grazing.

And while the project’s output is small for now, any and all new renewable energy generation will be welcome in Queensland, which – as Giles Parkinson wrote here yesterday – still has the lowest share of solar and wind than any other state on the main grid.