Found: Missing wind farm from Snowy Hydro’s “game changing” tender

Thanks to the sharp eyes of one of our regular readers, we can now finalise our list of the eight wind and solar farms that made up the “game changing” wind and solar tender that Snowy Hydro says will deliver “firm” renewable energy generation at less than $70/MWh – cheaper than current base-load.

As we noted at the time, and in our piece earlier this week “Transparency lost as Snowy Hydro fights for its future”, the federal government-owned refused to reveal the identify any of the winning project developers of its tender for “fair dinkum” wind and solar power, or the projects.

Earlier this week, we had seven of the eight winners, and now we can add the missing link, the 70MW Woolsthorpe wind farm in south-west Victoria now owned by Elecnor.

Our reader alerted us to this, having spotted a move reported in Sparkspread that Ironstone Capital was tapping capital markets to raise debt finance for the project, which if all goes well will begin construction in March or April next year.

We then got confirmation, so can now provide the full list of project developers that beat off another 100 proposals to wind the 15-year power purchase agreement from Snowy Hydro, boosting the amount of wind and solar used to pump water up hill if it gets its Snowy 2.0 pumped hydro scheme under way.

We don’t, however, have a list of all projects because some of the developers, namely LightsourceBP, CWP Renewables and Total Eren, are still not telling which of their portfolios are contracted to Snowy.

The solar portfolio:

Spanish group FRV with its 68MW Goonumbla solar project in NSW;

Clenergy with its 115MW Metz solar project also in NSW;

LightsourceBP, with a “portfolio of project” it has yet to identify.

Total Eren, also with a solar project/projects) that it has yet to identify.

The wind portfolio:

Tilt Renewables for half the output of its 336MW Dundonnell wind farm;

Macquarie/RES for stage 2 of the Murra Warra wind farm in Victoria;

CWP Renewables with project or projects that have not been revealed and may or may not have already been built;

and now Elecnor with its 70MW Woolsthorpe wind farm.