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Thursday, April 25, 2024

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Thursday, April 25, 2024
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Australian solar database – 161 projects, and 19GW of capacity

Giles Parkinson and Warwick Johnston
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RenewEconomy and consultancy Sunwiz are proud to announce the commencement of a new service tracking Australian solar farms that will bring you all the information you need to understand the outlook for Australian solar farms.

We will be bringing you regular updates within our newsletters, with full details on each individual project available for service subscribers.

To obtain more information on our service, please go to this page – https://reneweconomy.wpengine.com/large-scale-lookout-australian-solar-database/.

SunWiz and RenewEconomy are now tracking 161 solar farms through their development cycle. There is currently 19GW worth of solar projects that have been publicly announced, with more seeing the daylight with each passing week.

What’s interesting is that the solar farms that we’re tracking could generate in excess of 28.5TWh each year if they were all developed, which is almost as much generation as is required by the Renewable Energy Target (33TWh).

The lion’s share of the projects are based in Queensland, which alone has seen almost 10GW of projects announced.

To get the full details of each individual project, total volume in MW, and much much more, visit https://reneweconomy.wpengine.com/large-scale-lookout-australian-solar-database/

Warwick Johnston is the managing director of SunWiz, a board director of the Clean Energy Council, and an Australian representative to the IEA.  Giles Parkinson is founder and editor of RenewEconomy.

 

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Comments

8 responses to “Australian solar database – 161 projects, and 19GW of capacity”

  1. Jon Avatar
    Jon

    Thankyou!!
    It’s been doing my head in trying to keep track of progress in a spreadsheet and hunting down progress and forecast online dates.

    Any chance of getting Wind Power as well?

    1. Joe Avatar
      Joe

      …and why not the full suite to include Biogas, Tidal, Geo Thermal, these will surely become more important in the near future.

  2. MikeH Avatar
    MikeH

    I suspect that you have a unit problem here.

    >”There is currently 19GW worth of solar projects …”

    >”What’s interesting is that the solar farms that we’re tracking could generate in excess of 28.5GWh each year if they were all developed, which is almost as much generation as is required by the Renewable Energy Target (33GWh).”

    The RET target is 33,000 GWh (or 33 TWh) per year so I assume you mean 28,500 GWh (28.5 TWh) per year.

    19 GW -> 28,500 GWh would give a capacity factor of around 17% which is in the ballpark

    1. Giles Avatar
      Giles

      Well spotted. typo.
      fixed.

    2. Peter F Avatar
      Peter F

      If the majority are tracking solar the CF in the best cases is slightly over 30% so an average 25% CF would be reasonable, so Giles may well be underestimating the amount of power to be produced.
      The key question is the marginal cost of operating coal plants. In some cases the fuel cost of kicking up a coal generator’s output by 5% for a few hours will be as low as $15/MWh and sometimes they will even accept negative prices so they can capture $100-$14,000 later in the day or week.

      So in the battle to the death coal will offer prices below the cost of setting up a new solar plant. But when the coal plant has a major failure and the owner is faced with a multi-million repair bill or the supply of cheap coal runs out gradually the answer will be “Close it down”.

      On the other hand if the current construction of wind and solar causes prices to trend down it is much easier to stretch the life of an existing asset than press the go button on a new investment so the investment may be 1/2 or 1/4 of the current proposals

      Even though I am very pessimistic about the NEG, if the reliability part is based on actual despatch, very few of our coal plants can be relied upon so even that will not give “certainty”

      The only certainty is that creative destruction will continue and fortunes will be lost, mostly in coal but also some in wind and solar

  3. Anthony Gardner Avatar
    Anthony Gardner

    Your chart of projects by state would indicate there are 21 in the planning pipeline for NSW. A quick check of the NSW Major Projects Register shows 27. What am I missing?

  4. Jonathan Prendergast Avatar
    Jonathan Prendergast

    Is it suggesting in the 2nd graph there are 5-10 solar farms operating in QLD? y-axis is “Number of Records”, so could be that definition. Or could be my colour blindness.

  5. George Darroch Avatar
    George Darroch

    This is fantastic. I don’t have the $3k to pay for this, but many people who need this information do. I’m glad you’ve put it all together.

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