Australia’s Tag Pacific tapped to build 5MW solar plant in Samoa

ASX-listed energy investment group Tag Pacific announced on Monday that its wholly owned power business, MPower, had secured a $14 million contract to builda  5MW of solar power capacity in Samoa.

The deal will see MPower, alongside a subsidiary of First Solar, deliver a fully operational 5MW solar power station across two sites on the South Pacific nation, with the majority of the project scheduled to be built during the 2016 financial year.

Samoa, which has a goal of reaching 100 per cent renewable energy by 2017, recently sealed plans to build a second wind farm and hydro storage plant on Upolu island, which is home to most of the population.

Samoa’s first wind farm – a 550kW project also on Upolu Island – was developed by UAE clean energy company Masdar and inaugurated in August last year.

The addition of a 5MW solar power plant marks another big project for MPower – in fact, the largest solar project it has ever undertaken – after last year securing a deal to install one of Australia’s largest energy storage systems, an around 800kwH lithium-ion battery pack alongside the University of Queensland-owned Gatton solar power plant in south-east Queensland.

“The commencement of the Samoa solar project will boost MPower’s activities in the current financial year considerably,” said Tag CEO Nathan Wise in a statement on Monday.

“At the same time, MPower sees a number of other exciting renewable energy prospects on its near term horizon, quite apart from other conventional power generation and systems work in the oil and gas and commercial sectors,” he said.

Wise noted that MPower had positioned itself at the hub of converging opportunities in distributed power, through its focus on large-scale solar systems and energy storage.

In another ground-breaking, ARENA-backed solar plus storgae project in Australia, MPower is building a 1.7MW solar array at a mine in Weipa, North Queensland, with the option to add another 5MW of solar PV and some battery storage in the future.

Tag picked up the Weipa job after acquiring some of the assets of Ingenero, a one-time leading Australian solar developer that was placed under administration in the second half of 2014.