Fortescue plans huge 5.4GW wind, solar and battery storage hub in Pilbara

Andrew Forrest’s Fortescue Metals Group has unveiled plans to power its Pilbara mining operations – and other green industries – with a massive multi-gigawatt scale renewable energy hub combining wind, solar and battery storage.

The plans for the 5.4GW project have been submitted to the Western Australia’s Environmental Protection Authority. They will be built by Forrest’s newly formed Fortescue Future Industries, and through its Pilbara Energy subsidiary.

The WA EPA said the renewable energy hub – to be known as the Uaroo Renewable Energy Hub – would be built on the Uaroo and Emu Creek Pastoral Stations, roughly 120km south of Onslow.

The up to 5.4GW project, which is open for public comment for the coming week, proposes to generate electricity from up to 340 wind turbines (totalling more than 2GW) and a solar farm, up to 3,333MW, alongside a battery energy storage system sized up to 9,100 MWh.

The wind turbines would have a tip height of up to 250 metres and have a minimum distance of 2 km between longitudinal rows. The solar arrays would be constructed in between the rows of wind farms (see map below).

The huge project is part of Fortescue’s plan to achieve net zero operational emissions by 2030, and its massive green hydrogen and green ammonia plans.

Forrest has announced a slew of projects – including ambitious MOUs and transactions with hydrogen technology developers – but this is the first that outlines the scale of the new wind and solar projects that will be needed for the green hydrogen plans.

All told, Forrest plans to produce 15 million tonnes of green hydrogen a year by 2030, but that would likely need something in the order of 200GW of wind and solar, unless some of it comes from existing renewable projects, or even new hydro projects contemplated for Africa and perhaps South America.

The Pilbara renewable assets will be integrated with the company’s $700 million Project Energy Connect, which includes a $250 million transmission project that will install 275km of high voltage transmission lines connecting Fortescue’s mine sites and allowing them to be renewable powered.

Two of those mine sites are already partially powered by the 60MW Chichester solar farm, pictured above.

As big as the Fortescue project is, it is by no means the biggest in Australia. Software billionaire Mike Cannon-Brookes has proposed a 20GW solar farm, with a 34GWh battery hub, in the Northern Territory to help power Singapore and green industries. Forrest is also an investor in that project.

In W.A., CWP Global and Intercontinental have combined to propose two massive projects – the 50GW Western Green Energy Hub to the south, and the 26GW Asian Renewable Energy Hub, also in the Pilbara, to power green hydrogen and green ammonia production.

Forrest has been outspoken about the need to push green hydrogen, and ignore fossil fuel hydrogen, which he and FFI chair and former prime minister Malcom Turnbull describe as a “con”. On Tuesday, Forrest took out double page ad spreads in key newspapers to attack the Coalition’s “hydrogen greenwash.”