Mixed Greens: Little windy, a lot of gas

TRUenergy says it has lodged an application to build a 123MW wind farm at Stony Gap, just south of the town of Burra in South Australia, and has secured options over a further 250MW of wind farm developments in NSW. In its annual results released in Hong Kong late Monday, the company also confirmed it had resubmitted an application to build a 180MW solar PV farm near Mildura as part of the Solar Flagships program, which has been reopened for tender.

Most of TRUenergy’s developments will be in gas, with previously announced proposals to build up to 1500MW of gas-fired generation in Queensland and another 700MW gas-fired plant near Marulan in NSW. Investment decisions on those will be taken later this year. TRUenergy’s parent company, CLP Holdings, said it was yet to take a final decision on a proposal to float 49 per cent of the company on the ASX.

That decision is likely to wait until after the result of the proposed buyback of brown coal-fired generation by the federal government. TRUenergy’s biggest asset, the Yallourn power station, is a candidate in that tender. TRUenergy wrote down the value of that asset by $350 million, but its overall earnings more than doubled to $HK2.9 billion as a result of its purchase of the EnergyAustralia retail business and the Delta Western gentrader contracts from the NSW government.

Reverse auction record

Kolkata-based Alex Green Energy has won a tender to develop a 5MW solar PV plant in India’s Odisha State at a price of 7,000 rupees/MWh ($A131/MWh). Bloomberg reported that this was a record low in India, which has been running a series of reverse auction tenders – similar to the process proposed in the ACT – as part of its push to install 20GW of solar by 2022. If Alex Green delivers on the contract – it must complete the project by August 2013 – it has the option of developing the remaining 20MW of capacity under this auction. The previous lowest bid for solar PV in India was from France’s Solairedirect, which bid 7,490 rupees/MWh for a 5MW plant in an auction in December. The latest price is little above the cost of new-build coal-fired plant in India, Bloomberg data shows.

Subsidy cuts kill Spain’s appeal

Having topped the charts for clean energy investment only five years ago, Spain has this year dropped out of the top 10 renewable energy markets for investors, and is languishing in 11th place with Australia; a fall from grace – and its first time outside of the top 10 since the index began in 2003 – that has been put down to the suspension, in January, of the nation’s renewables subsidies. In the latest Ernst & Young Renewable Energy Country Attractiveness Index, published by Ernst & Young on Tuesday, China leads the pack as investors venture away from Europe, where debt-burdened governments have reduced aid for solar and wind power projects. “The sovereign debt crisis continues to stifle the euro zone, and also policy setters’ ambitions in relation to renewable-energy deployment,” Ernst & Young said in a statement. “Capital scarcity and increased competition from Asia will continue to put pressure on Western players for the foreseeable future.”

Solar thermal saves

Meanwhile, Spanish group Acciona says that solar thermal technology costs are less than those of solar PV in some parts of the world, including Australia. Company chairman Jose Manuel Entrecanales, who visited Australia last year to open the Gunning wind farm, said solar thermal power plants are an economic alternative in mining areas in Australia that have high levels of sunlight, strong industrial power demand and are far from the conventional power grid. He said similar conditions exist in parts of Latin America, Bloomberg reported. “Those projects will become landmarks” for the technology, he said. “From there we will pass on to the next generation of efficiency.”

Emissions data

The Federal government has published its annual survey of  greenhouse gas emissions and energy consumption data for the top 425 Australian corporate emitters and energy users. It is the third time that the data has been released under the National Greenhouse and Energy Reporting act, despite some criticisms about the quality of the data expressed earlier this month. The latest data can be found here.