Dutch renewable investors lose money on sale of Australian solar and hybrid assets

The Dutch-based renewable energy investor Photon Energy says it has made a loss on the sale of its Australian based solar portfolio, which includes a small solar-battery hybrid project development.

Photon last year announced the sale to CleanPeak Energy of a portfolio of 15 MW of operating solar farms around Leeton and Fivebough and a development stage 8.2 MW, 10.9 MWh solar battery hybrid facility at Boggabri.

The sale – for €6 million ($A9.9 million) – resulted in a loss of €1.55 million ($A2.55 million), and helped deepen the company’s overall loss at the before tax and interest payments level to €4.61 million in the latest quarter, and to a loss of €3.14 million for the half.

Photon decided to sell the Australian assets because they were the least profitable of its portfolio that is otherwise European based – in Romania, Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary – although it also has a contract to build a 20 MW solar plant in New Zealand.

Its accounts show that the Leeton and Fivebough solar farms – all sized at under 5 MW each to avoid stricter connection rules that apply to bigger projects, and selling mostly on market – earned an average €38 and €39 a megawatt hour ($A62-64/MWh), significantly lower than eye-watering numbers of more than €600 received in the Czech Republic.

In short, the Australian solar farms produced more because of the better conditions, but earned less.

On the flip side, it posted a €1.1 million gain relating from the previous sale of project rights to the soon-to-be- built Maryvale solar farm south of Dubbo in NSW. The original sale occurred in late 2021, but the gain results from the completion of additional milestones.

However, the company faces some headwinds in Europe, with price caps, grid connection refusals, and the scrapping of some feed in tariffs and other regulatory changes in Hungary and the Czech Republic in particular.

Photon also owns a 5 per cent stake in RayGen, the Australian company that in 2023 opened a landmark 50 MWh solar tower and storage facility near Mildura, and had been talking of taking that technology to an even bigger scale with a potential 2,000 MWh project at Yadnarie in South Australia.

But the financial statement makes no mention of Yadnarie. Instead, the company talks of a 1.8 GWh thermal hydro storage project in Winterton, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, that it says has received “favourable” grid connection terms. It is working with Eskom to find the technical solution to integrating the plant into the grid.

An Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) is expected to be concluded by Q4 this year and an energy licence sought from the local regulator, with a view to starting construction in the first half of 2026.

“The RayGen solar hydro solution to be incorporated into this plant addresses the growing need for long-duration energy storage by combining concentrated solar electricity and heat generation with a water-based thermal storagesolution that can provide dispatchable synchronous energy over periods exceeding 12 hours,” it says.

The other shareholders in RayGen are AGL Energy, Chevron, Equinor and SLB (formerly Schlumberger), along with the Australian Renewable Energy Agency.

Renew Economy reached out to Photon to find out more about the Australian projects but did not hear back before publication.