Gladstone attracts another solar battery hybrid, with $2 billion project that would be Australia’s biggest

The Queensland industrial hub of Gladstone – home to huge smelters and refineries – has attracted another major solar and battery hybrid project, this one a $2 billion facility that would be the biggest of its type in Australia.

The Wooderson solar is being developed by Central Queensland Power, a joint venture between Energy Estate and Res Australia, and proposes a 450 megawatt (MW) solar farm along with an eight-hour battery sized at up to 3,600 megawatt hours (MWh).

That would make it bigger than the newly expanded Richmond solar hybrid project, and could be joined by a wind facility sized at up to 816 MW – assuming it can get the project through Queensland’s strict new planning rules and an LNP government that has ripped up the state’s renewable energy targets.

Gladstone is hungry for power and Rio Tinto has flagged it needs enough wind and solar, and battery storage, to replace the Gladstone coal fired power generator that it says must close in 2028. It has made clear the future of its smelters and refineries depend on a switch to renewables and storage.

It has signed several major contracts for wind, solar and solar-battery hybrids, but still needs more projects to replace the Gladstone power source. Other energy hungry industries are also eyeing the area.

The Wooderson solar-battery hybrid project has now been referred to the federal EPBC process, which states the project will cover 5,618 hectares (ha) and disturb up to 1,849 ha – but notes this is the maximum possible and represents “the worst-case vegetation clearing scenario”.

The map belies just how large the project is, with battery units proposed to be assigned to individual sections of the solar project rather than built in one location. Image: Central Queensland Power

If all approvals come in as expected – no longer a sure thing in Queensland’s uncertain regulatory environment – the plans estimate construction to start in early 2028, take 37 months, and operations to start in early 2031. 

The plans outlined in the EPBC referral and on the project website show a need for 11km of new 275 kilovolt (kV) power lines to connect some 980,000 solar panels to the nearby Powerlink transmission network feeding into Gladstone. 

But the EPBC approval is just one of four that will be needed: the project needs to also go through the Queensland Government State Assessment and Referral Agency (SARA), the Gladstone Regional Council, and the Office of the Coordinator-General.

But the state government is proving an increasingly unknown quantity. 

In December it called in two more battery projects for reassessment under new rules passed in 2025. Earlier in the year it pulled the rug from under others, such as the proposed 1.2 gigawatt (GW) Forest Wind project, which had state approval.

The new energy roadmap forecasts no new renewables will be built between 2030 and 2035, other than those already committed.

That’s a prediction that flies in the face of the more than 15 gigawatts (GW) of wind, solar and battery projects feeding into Gladstone’s energy-hungry industrial area, of which more than 6 GW have state approval, according to RenewMap data.

But despite investment in Queensland vanishing in 2025, some developers such as Central Queensland Power are pushing forward with plans and succeeding with approvals. 

For example, European Energy’s 1.1 GW Calliope solar project, on the other side of the Dawson Highway and Powerlink’s 275kV cable, received planning approval in December. 

The $2 billion solar and battery side of the Wooderson project, despite its huge area, appears to come with very few environmental consequences for the federal process to take note of. 

“A review of historical aerial imagery indicates that large scale land clearing for stock grazing has occurred across the Project Area since 1959,” the EPBC referral says. 

“However, portions of the south-western Project Area have remained relatively undisturbed since the late 1990s and currently support mature regrowth communities of sparse to open woodlands, dominated by native Eucalyptus and Melaleuca species.”

The likelihood of occurrence for six threatened fauna species is moderate, with possibilities that squatter pigeons, greater gliders (southern), koalas, yakka skinks, white-throated needletails, Latham’s snipes and grey-headed flying foxes could live on the site.

The environmental surveys found remnant woodlands covering 758.1 ha of the total 5,618 ha project area and regrowth woodland covering another 438.3 ha. In these areas there was one patch of woodland earmarked as endangered flora, and four ‘of concern’.

One of the bigger environmental issues to be resolved is the impact on the Calliope river, which lies 500m to the north and feeds into the Great Barrier Reef.

The developer suggests its solar project won’t be an issue for the reef however, given it’s 19km inland and because it plans to use measures such as diversions to ensure sediment isn’t washed off site into the river and thus downstream to the ocean.

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