Chart of the Day: Sunshine state shows off solar potential in middle of winter

While June was a month of wind energy generation records around Australia, the latest data from Rystad Energy demonstrates why Queensland is known as the Sunshine State.

As illustrated in the chart below from Rystad senior analyst in renewables research, David Dixon, all but one of the top performing utility-scale solar assets in Australia for the month of June was located in Queensland.

The table is led – not for the first time – by Genex Power’s Kidston project in the state’s far north (pictured above), which recorded a capacity factor of 23 per cent.

Dixon notes that this was followed by Pacific Hydro’s Haughton stage 1 solar farm (22.4% AC CF) and Adani Australia’s Rugby Run solar farm (22.4% AC CF).

The one exception is the New South Wales 100MW Gunnedah solar farm, which comes in fifth with a capacity factor of roughly 21% from its position west of Tamworth.

Dixon says that Australian large-scale solar and wind assets generated a total of 3458GWh in the month of June, up from 2626GWh (+32%) in June 2021. 

But as noted above, it was all about wind in June with wind farms on the NEM and the WEM contributing 2839GWh to that total and delivering wind’s highest month on record.

You can read about that here. See: Wind generation overtakes brown coal in June, in month of new records