Australia’s biggest solar project to be built in chunks to manage increase in negative prices

Genex Power has decided to build the massive 2 gigawatt (GW) Bulli Creek solar and battery project in south Queensland in smaller chunks, but says it remains committed to delivering the whole thing.

The reconfiguration, as Genex is calling it, is being blamed on the deteriorating market conditions for large scale solar projects – even though this one comes with an adjoining big battery that could be sized at up to 600 megawatts (MW) and 2,400 megawatt-hours (MWh).

CEO Craig Francis says the decision follows the increase in negative pricing events on the wholesale electricity market, driven by a surplus of solar, particularly rooftop PV.

“The wholesale prices are coming down which is great for consumers, but when you’re trying to bring in capital for large projects, it makes things more difficult,” Francis told Renew Economy.

The first 775 MW stage was supposed to be financially committed by the end of 2025 and construction starting this year. The first battery stage –sized at 400 MW and 1600 MWh – was also supposed to start being built half way through that, with the second two stages of solar coming later.

Francis believes the factors continually dragging daytime electricity prices negative are temporary – a result of surplus rooftop PV that is yet to be absorbed by home batteries and the fact that, in Queensland, coal fired power stations will linger for longer.

But he also says it’s hard for investors to ignore the existing trend and, as a result, it is tricky to find buy-in for what would be Australia’s largest solar project under construction.

“It’s hard to ignore when every year it seems to get worse, and in the context of the scale of investment needed it was deemed to be too big a bite for the first project,” Francis says.

Genex will be unveiling its new staging strategy for the solar-battery project to locals in a town hall meeting next week. 

The enormous project has been in the development pipeline for more than a decade after securing local government development approval in 2015, and being waved through the federal EPBC queue in 2017.

It ran into another snag last year, when a chicken farm reportedly appealed the Toowoomba regional council’s approval of an 800-person work camp in the Queensland Planning and Environment Court.

Francis says Genex’s owner, Japan’s J Power, is committed to building the full vision.

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