Port Augusta wind hub resumes production after 3-week hiatus caused by “flickering”

The Port Augusta Renewable Energy Park, which will be Australia’s biggest wind and solar hybrid facility once complete, has resumed production after a three week hiatus caused by oscillation issues that caused “flickering” in the South Australia grid late last month.

Production was halted at PAREP on June 24 after repeated “flickers” and voltage fluctuations were experienced on the local grid the previous night.

Energy authorities identified the source of the problem as the new Port Augusta Renewable Energy Park, which is owned by Iberdrola Australia and will have a combined capacity of 317MW, making it the biggest of its type in the country.

Production was immediately halted at Parep, which had been working its way through the various stages of commissioning of the wind component of the facility, and had reached an output of around 140MW, out of its total capacity of 210MW.

The 107MW solar component is largely complete but has not yet started its commissioning process. It will operate as a separate generating unit despite being co-located, with its own DUID (market identifier).

This week, production at PAREP resumed, albeit at very low levels, initially at just a few megawatts, occasionally up to 20MW, and back down again.

RenewEconomy understands that output will continue to be volatile as part of testing to satisfy the transmission operator ElectraNet and the market operator AEMO that the plant’s settings have been fixed.

Once resolved, the wind component will be able to resume at its most recent “hold point” setting of 140MW, before being allowed to move to higher output levels as the commissioning process continues.

Earlier this week, production resumed at the Walkaway wind farm in Western Australia, also owned by Iberdrola, after more than one month offline following the still unexplained collapse of one of the facility’s 54 wind turbines.