First off-grid solar and battery system to power a mine site in NSW switches on

The first off-grid solar farm and battery to power a mine site in New South Wales is fully operational, its developer says, supplying an average up to 40 per cent renewable energy with the potential to operate in hydrocarbons-off mode most days.

The 26 megawatt (MW) hybrid power system at Tronox’s Atlas–Campaspe mineral sands mine near Hatfield combines an 11 megawatt (MW) solar farm, a 3 MW/6 megawatt-hour (MWh) battery energy storage system (BESS), 12 MW of diesel generation and 13km of high-voltage powerlines.

It has replaced 41 distributed diesel generators that had been used to power the mine, reducing its annual carbon emissions by around 13,000 tonnes and displacing nearly five million litres of diesel a year.

Western Australia-based Pacific Energy announced the project’s completion on LinkedIn on Monday, notching up the milestone as an “important step” in the off-grid power system specialist’s expansion to Australia’s east coast.

The vast majority of Pacific Energy’s pioneering work weaning remote mine sites off diesel and other fossil fuels has been done in the West, including one of Australia’s biggest off-grid hybrid renewable energy projects at Gold Fields’ St Ives mine south of Kalgoorlie.

“The Atlas-Campaspe system is the first we’ve delivered in NSW and marks an important step in our operational expansion on Australia’s east coast,” the LinkedIn post says.

“Our project team and client achieved this exciting milestone on Friday, 18 July after safely and successfully testing the system’s functionality on the mine site’s operating processing plant.”