Image: Elaine solar farm planning documents. Elaine solar farm location.
UK-based Elgin Energy as won approval for its third renewable energy project in the last half year and is builds out its Australian development portfolio.
The company announced that the Elaine solar farm near the famous Meredith music festival site in central Victoria will host a 150 megawatt (MW) solar project and a 250 MWh battery and was approved by the state on May 3.
The project will be finished by August 2025, according to Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) expectations.
The project covers two sites, the 65 hectare ‘Peters’ and the 158 hectare ‘Windy’, with 60,636 PV modules to be installed with plans to allow sheep grazing underneath. Elgin will build a substation on the western Peters half of the project to connect to the neighbouring Elaine substation.
The new solar project is in a hot location for renewables projects.
About 10k to the north is where half of the 288 MW Lal Lal wind farm is being built – the other half is immediately to the south of Elgin’s project. Also a couple of kilometres to the south is the existing 84 MW Elaine wind farm and Akaysha Energy’s approved 311MW, four hour/1244 MWh battery at the Elaine substation.
For Elgin, now majority owned by Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners after a buy-in announced in April, Elaine is just the latest in a string of successful applications across the eastern seaboard.
In February, it won Victorian approval for the 60 MW Shady Creek solar farm and two hour (120 MWh) battery in Gippsland in Victoria.
Just a fortnight earlier the New South Wales (NSW) government approved the same-sized Glanmire solar project which is East of Bathurst and within the new Central West Orana renewable energy zone.
The project is going ahead after the developers agreed to extend the set-backs from its boundaries, and preserve the site for current and future farming activities, including sheep grazing, following 131 community objections.
The company says it now has 4 gigawatts of renewables projects under development in NSW Queensland and Victoria.
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