A massive 2 gigawatt hybrid wind, solar and battery storage project proposed for Western Australia’s Mid West region has joined the queue for federal environmental assessment, just a few months after securing all of its required state approvals.
The Tathra wind farm proposes to combine up to 1,000 megawatt (MW) of wind, an up to 500 MW solar farm and up to three battery energy storage systems (BESS) with a combined capacity of up to 500 MW at a site around 15 km east of the town of Eneabba.
Developer Synergy Renewable Energy Developments (SynergyRED), a subsidiary of state-owned gentailer Synergy, says the proposed project is “crucial” to maintaining affordable and reliable electricity supply for customers across the South West Interconnected System (SWIS).
According to the referral documents, the 140-turbine wind farm would span 14 freehold lots, on land that is zoned “rural,” that Synergy has legal access to through option to lease agreements or consent letters with landowners.
SynergyRED says the proposed project area is mainly used for agricultural purposes and consists of predominantly cleared land, with pockets of remnant native vegetation that are proposed to be largely retained.
The documents say the wind turbine will have towers up to 160 metres in height with blades up to 90 m long, with a minimum tip-height of 40 m and maximum tip-height of up to 250 m. But they also stress that the final turbine model has not been selected, so “flexibility in the layout is required.”
A “clearing exclusion area” of around 1,054 hectares is proposed within the project area, the documents say, to avoid and minimise impacts to significant patches of native vegetation and fauna habitat, including a known nesting tree for Carnaby’s Cockatoo and one known nesting tree, with suitable hollows and evidence of usage.
As the referral opens to public submissions, Synergy might be hoping for a similarly speedy decision as it received at the state level, where the wind component of the project was waved through by the development and environmental approvals process within four months.
The gentailer plans to shut its ageing 240 MW Collie A coal power station in 2027 and the Muja 7 and 8 (both 227 MW) in late 2029.
On the renewables side of the ledger, Synergy has four wind projects in development or under construction, including Tathra; the biggest of which is the expanded Warradarge wind farm, where work is underway not to lift capacity to 283 MW in 2027.
It owns two operating wind farms that are less than 2 MW each and the two-stage Kwinana battery, which totals 300 MW and 1000 megawatt hours (MWh) of storage.
The company’s experience with grid-scale solar is the 47 MW, two stage Greenough River project. Most of its recent efforts have been focused on battery storage.
Synergy is currently commissioning one of the country’s biggest battery projects, the 500 MW, 2,000 MWh facility at Collie, adding to the two big batteries it has built at the site of its Kwinana gas generator (and former coal plant) that total 300 MW and more than 1,100 MWh.
The Collie battery – located just up the road from Neoen’s even bigger 560 MW, 2,240 MWh battery at Collie – will take Synergy’s total big battery capacity to more than 800 MW (and nearly 3,200 MWh).
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