Forget nuclear: 5B says plunging price of PV means giga-scale solar farms the future for old coal plants

Australian solar innovator 5B says the plunging price of photovoltaic technology has made the company’s prefabricated Maverick arrays cost-competitive with single axis tracking solar plants – and in some cases cheaper, depending on the quality of the solar resource.

In a presentation to the Large-scale Renewable Generation & Storage Summit in Sydney on Thursday, 5B deputy CEO Nicole Kuepper-Russell said the company’s value proposition was “really singing” since module prices fell to just over 10 cents per watt in China in March.

The low cost of solar was a hot topic at the conference, as was the falling cost of storage.

In a presentation by former Clean Energy Finance Corporation chief Oliver Yates, the renewables investment guru argued cheaper batteries mean most existing government and industry plans should be “shredded and start again” to account for the “new solar/battery economic frontier.”

Representing Valent Energy – the energy storage focused joint venture between Gaw Capital and BW ESS – Yates said the cost of dispatchable renewables was now around $200/MWh – $65/MWh for solar production and $135/MWh for battery storage – and “anything producing power higher than that is ridiculous.”

For 5B – as Kuepper-Russell’s presentation illustrated, below – the levelised cost of energy for a solar project using its Maverick arrays hit price parity with the LCOE of single axis tracker solar towards the end of last year, and has steadily become cheaper as panel prices continue to fall.

“This is for 35 degrees latitude, so that’s kind of New South Wales-ish, and that crossover point happened at about the 17 cent per watt point,” Kuepper-Russell told Renew Economy on Friday.

“The higher the latitude, the … closer to the equator you go, the more that shifts to the right. So the crossover point is more kind of the 22 cents per watt, when it’s up higher.

“But basically, well and truly that crossover point for us has happened, and that has really led to an increase in sales and interest, which is great.”

Already, 5B’s approach to solar generation offers a bunch of cost and logistical advantages over traditionally installed PV farms. Its Maverick arrays – assembled in an accordion-like structure in a factory in Adelaide – are pre-wired, fully plug-and-play, trucked/shipped to site and unfolded using a forklift. Once deployed, each 5B Maverick is roughly 40m long and 9m wide.

“One of the big benefits of our technology is that we move a lot of [the] work into a factory where we can use unskilled [labour] or people who we then train to assemble our technology …[which is] then obviously tested and commissioned by an electrician in the field,” Kuepper-Russell says.

“But we’ve reduced the number [of workers needed] in the field by about 70% because of that.”

It’s also really quick to roll out – making it a popular choice for powering off-grid mining projects. 5B’s current record deployment speed is 1.25MW in one day with eight people at the Liontown lithium mine in Western Australia.

But Kuepper-Russell says an increasingly valuable part of 5B’s technology equation is its ultra-economic use of land.

“In the US … the value or the cost of land for solar projects is increasing at about 10% per annum,” she tells Renew Economy. While in Australia, whether or not you can find suitable land, and then “whether or not you can ever get approval to build anything on it is [becoming a] giant problem.

Add to this Australia’s “real challenge” with transmission and with preservation of biodiversity and agricultural land, “and good connection points become gold,” Kuepper-Russell says. “And it just means that we want to cram as much [cheap new generation] in as close to where it is needed as possible.”

This makes the sites of retired and retiring coal plants ideal – the same sites the federal opposition leader dreams of putting nuclear plants; the same sites the current owners have earmarked for big batteries, among other renewable energy related things.

In turn, land once used to dig up, process and burn coal is ideal for 5B’s technology.

“We can deploy on, basically, anything,” Kuepper-Russell says. “Not on water, yet … and not on very steep cliff tops, but we have deployed on tailing dams and rock dumps and coal ash and landfill … and that ability to leverage … [post-industrial] land is so important.”

This has led the company to embark on some “thought experiments” of what 5B could achieve using the land attached to some of Australia’s biggest coal plants, including AGL’s shuttered Liddell power station in Muswellbrook in New South Wales.

“If you look at kind of a 30km radius around Liddell …we could build a 4GW solar power plant using about 1% of the land,” Kuepper-Russell says.

There’s [also] a whole bunch of pre-disturbed land there that we’re looking at [at Eraring]; 50 hectares, which is about 90 megawatts for us.”

Indeed, Kuepper-Russell notes that, using the $500 million that potentially could be spent by the NSW government to keep Origin Energy’s Eraring coal plant open for longer, 5B could build a 1GW Maverick solar plant on that facility.

“They’re already doing a whole lot of storage [at Eraring]. So can those dollars be invested more sensibly in leveraging that asset so that it can close on time and we can save that $500 million and decarbonise at the rate that we need to? So that is the thought experiment that we are continuing to push.”