Howdy neighbour! First-timer wants to plant huge renewable hub next to existing solar project

A real estate investor is marking North Queensland for its first foray into renewables in the contested Upper Burdekin area – and it wants to slide in right next to the existing Haughton solar farm.

Cambridge JMD Australia is proposing a 374 megawatt (MW) solar farm on former sugarcane farmland near Upper Haughton, about 80km south of Townsville, and has just lodged planning documents with the local council. 

The initial $650 million project is the first stage of a much more ambitious $1.7 billion green energy “hub” that would add another 956 MW of solar to the rest of the site and energy storage technology.

The first stage is estimated to take two years to build, although the company has no timelines in place as yet. The developer will be Confluence Energy, a newly created in-house developer for the Australian company’s parent, Singapore-based real estate investor Cambridge RE Partners.

Directly across the fence, however, is the 100 MW Haughton solar farm owned by Pacific Blue, the first stage of another bigger project plan, but which has been hurt by curtailment as the North Queensland grid struggled to cope with renewables pressures and system strength issues.

In 2022, Haughton was the fifth best performing solar generator in the country, but in 2020 its production had been constrained by the regulator so much because of grid strength issues that by July it’d only been allowed to generate for a week. 

Last year, it was also one of the worst affected Queensland solar farms by changes to marginal loss factor calculations, driven by the return to full operation of the Callide C coal power station unit after an explosion in 2019 closed it down.

The first stage of the Haughton solar farm was finished in 2019 and a second stage of 400 MW of solar and a battery was always planned. That upgrade is now sized at 300 MW with a 200MW (2-hour duration) battery, which the company is currently finalising and hopes to start construction on in 2025, a spokesperson told RenewEconomy.

Pacific Blue was first granted development approval of the Haughton Solar Farm project in June 2017 and continues to enjoy a productive relationship with the Burdekin Shire Council and the Burdekin community.

The Cambridge project proposal expects that by co-locating with the Haughton site it can benefit from existing infrastructure “to create a defacto renewable energy precinct in itself”. 

“The site is very well located in regard to electricity infrastructure, with a Powerlink high voltage electricity transmission corridor traversing the site into which the proposal will ultimately be connected,” the planning application to the Burdekin Council says.

“The solar farm will be delivered progressively, with stage one involving connection of 100MW in generation to Powerlink’s transmission network via a new adjacent 275kV substation.”

The Burdekin area is part of the Far North Queensland Renewable Energy Zone (REZ), a REZ that was underway before the government started its legislated REZ process. 

It’s in heavy demand for renewables developers, and a source of some highly contentious projects. 

Squadron-owned developer Windlab was forced to shrink the Upper Burdekin wind farm – now renamed as the Gawara Baya wind farm – from 136 turbines with a capacity of 600-950 MW, to 80 turbines with a 400 MW capacity on concerns from multiple environmental groups about the impact on local wildlife. 

But even that wasn’t enough to remove the PR stink for former offtaker Apple, which pulled out last year. 

Elsewhere, the 5 gigawatt (GW) Pioneer-Burdekin pumped hydro project is a centrepiece of the Queensland Labor government’s renewables strategy and open up the northern regions for more wind and solar projects, although it’s not expected to be operational until 2033, if it goes ahead.