NT Defence solar farm finally opens after years-long delay

The first of a number of long awaited solar farms in the Northern Territory has finally opened this week, after being blocked from producing energy because of strict conditions on solar farm projects across the Top End over the last few years.

Matt Thistlethwaite, Assistant Minister for Defence told ABC Darwin Breakfast that the 3.2 MW solar farm at the RAAF Base Darwin was now open. This 9,000 solar panel project began tender in 2017, and was expected to be completed in 2020.  

Thistlethwaite also noted that two other department of Defence solar farm – 9.2MW facility at Robertson Barracks and 1.4 MW Hart’s Range will also open later this year.

Most of these facilities will be mostly ‘behind the metre’, powering the building itself, but interestingly, he also suggested that leftover power from RAAF Base Darwin will be fed into the grid.

This is now okay for those three facilities, but for four other utility-scale solar farms in the NT who are trying to add power to the grid, regulation added after the fact has meant that they’re fighting an uphill battle.  

These solar farms in Manton, Batchelor, and Katherine are either sitting idle or have been producing only a small amount of power since their completion in 2020.

Strict rules dictate bidding behaviour and dispatch, which has meant most solar farms have not been able to connect to the grid at all, instead requiring large batteries to manage the flow of energy.

Another issue is that both the RAAF base and Robertson Barracks are much closer to Darwin, making the transport of energy mostly painless. This is not the case with the solar farms further out in Manton, Batchelor, and Katherine.

A RenewEconomy report points out that one of the issues is that the transmission line between Darwin and Katherine is very ‘skinny’ and doesn’t have much capacity.

“In some power systems the growth of asynchronous generation has been so fast that the market and or market rules have not adapted to avoid the risks to system security and reliability from such rapid growth,” a 2020 Electricity Outlook Report from the NT Utilities Commission said.  

“For the Territory’s power systems, which are small, isolated, lacking in diversity of renewable energy technologies and without appropriate supporting frameworks, the challenges and opportunities are likely greater and certainly immediate in terms of needing urgent attention to protect the long‑term interests of Territory electricity consumers.”

The RAAF base being able to add a small amount of power to the grid is hopefully promising, but RenewEconomy has reached out to the NT minister for Energy Kate Worden for further comment.