Australian solar farms set new output record in middle of winter – again

One of the more curious of the renewable output records that keep tumbling as more capacity is rolled out across the Australian grid is that of large scale solar – its output records are often broken in the middle of winter.

On Monday, it happened again, with the combined output of large scale solar farms on the country’s main grid reaching a new peak of 5,652 MW, up from the previous record of 5,635 MW set in February this year.

This may seem counter-intuitive, but these output records are not based on daily generation (when the longer, hotter summer days would surely win) but on instantaneous output (which benefits from the clear skies of winter).

According to GPE NemLog2 (see graph below), a record set in early February last year (then at 4549 MW), was not bettered until early September, and records set in early February in both 2021 and 2020 stood until the clear skies of August too the output to the next level.

The first solar farm on Australia’s main grid was opened in early 2015. There is now more than  7,500MW of large scale solar capacity on Australia main  grid, which contributed around 6.3 per cent of the electricity consumed in the last 12 months. That still trails rooftop solar, which contributed more than 10 per cent.