Kiamal solar farm. Source: Total Eren.
Total Eren, a renewable energy developer partly owned by French oil giant Total, says it is looking at a massive number of “gigawatt” scale renewable projects in Australia as part of a major global push into renewable hydrogen.
The company already owns and operates the 256MW (dc) Kiamal solar farm in Victoria (pictured above), and is about to begin construction of a 192MW (dc) second stage, which will feature DC-coupled inverters as well as a neighbouring big battery of up to 300MWh of storage.
But the big push is now into gigawatt-scale projects that will support green hydrogen production facilities, and the company says it has identified 30GW of of potential generation capacity in Australia from its 40 strong team.
To put that number in some perspective, that is equivalent to double the installed capacity of large scale wind and solar in Australia, and is bigger than two of the most prominent large scale projects – the 20GW Sun Cable project in the Northern Territory, and the 26GW Asia Renewable Energy Hub in Western Australia.
Total Eren says its development pipeline is spread out across a number of states, but it is setting up a new office in Perth, the capital of Western Australia, to capitalise on a number of project proposals in that state.
“Australia is key in Total Eren’s global strategy,” said David Corchia, the CEO of Total Eren.
The company statement said its team of more than 40 renewable energy experts in Australia has over the past 18 months put together a green hydrogen development pipeline with up to 30 GW of generation capacity across the Northern Territory, Queensland, South Australia and WA.
One of those projects was identified last year, when it announced an agreement with the Northern Territory government to build the Darwin H2 Hub, including more than 2GW of solar and a 1GW hydrogen electrolyser.
It had also flagged a massive 8 GW green hydrogen facility in Western Australia, known as HyEnergy, that it was going to develop with Australian miner Province Resources.
However, the term sheet between the two companies was not extended and Province now intends to develop that project itself, or with another party.
“While Total Eren had a good track record in developing renewables projects, the Board’s view was that the objectives of Total Eren for the development of the HyEnergy Project were not fully aligned with the objectives of Province,” the company said in a a statement in February.
Total Eren late last year also announced a planned 10GW wind facility in Chile to support an 8GW hydrogen electrolyser plant, along with a desalination plant and an ammonia plant. That project hopes to begin production in 2027.
Total Eren was founded in 2012 by Pâris Mouratoglou and David Corchia, and has more than 3,700MW of wind, solar and hydro projects in operation or under construction worldwide. Since December 2017, TotalEnergies, part of the Total group, has been participating as a shareholder of Total Eren.
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