New solar farm offers bite-size PPAs for small business on road to energy democracy

One Step off The Grid

The completion of the 9.4MW Robinvale solar farm last week marked a milestone not just for the project’s developer Suntech, but also for a company called WePower and its plans to open up Australia’s renewable energy procurement market to a potentially huge market of small businesses.

As RenewEconomy reported last week, Suntech’s 9.47MW(AC) Robinvale solar farm was successfully commissioned last week by Suntech Power Development Australia around 90km south-west of Mildura in Victoria.

Suntech Power Japan Corporation CEO Zeight Gao said on Friday that the completion of Robinvale marked the company’s first 100% owned project in the Australian pipeline to come to realisation. “And we look to further expand our solar footprint in Australia,” he said.

And while the project is relatively small in the scheme of the Australian large-scale solar market, it has layers of significance.

First, the electricity from the solar farm was contracted to upstart retailer Mojo Power, as the result of a deal struck in October of last year, to add to Mojo’s expanding portfolio of wholesale renewable power.

Then, in February of this year, a secondary Power Purchase Agreement was inked between Mojo and boutique electricity retailers People Energy (Vic) and Q Energy (Vic, NSW and Qld).

The 10-year, $10 million PPA, was a bit different, however, in that it was executed using digitised contractual architecture, enabled by the energy tokenisation technology of Lithuania-based company WePower – a first in Australia.

And it means that corporates will have the opportunity to buy renewable power from the 9.4MW solar farm via a secondary marketplace facilitated by blockchain technology.

To read the full story on RenewEconomy sister site One Step Off The Grid, click here…