Biggest solar PV plant in Queensland to be built at Gatton

The largest solar PV plant in Queensland is to be built on a former airstrip in the small town of Gatton as part of a research agreement struck as part of the funding of the 157MW solar plant to be built in NSW by AGL Energy and First Solar.

The 3.28MW solar PV plant will be used as a solar PV research facility by University of Queensland and the University of NSW. Construction at Gatton, located in the Lockyer Valley, west of Brisbane, will begin early in 2014 and completed later in the year.

It will be the biggest plant in Queensland, overtaking the 1.2MW facility on the rooftop of UQ, which remains the country’s largest rooftop installation.  However other projects proposed for the Collinsville power station and by the Sunshine Coast council, among numerous others, will likely be much bigger and could be built within the next 18 months.

The plant will serve as a pilot for the two solar farms being constructed by AGL and using First Solar’s thin film panels in NSW. Those plants will be built at Broken Hill and Nyngan as part of a $450 million project partly funded by the Federal and NSW governments, and including a $40.7 million grant for solar research through the Education Investment Fund.

UQ professor Paul Meredith said the plant at the Gatton campus would be one of the largest and most sophisticated facilities for solar PV research anywhere in the world.

“Components of our research will focus on energy storage, plant optimisation, power systems and the impact of renewable energy on the National Electricity Market,” he said in a statement.

“We will be able to test new technology and concepts at a meaningful scale and our work will help build national capacity for research in solar power deployment.”

Jack Curtis, First Solar’s vice president of business development for Asia Pacific, said Australia should be a very obvious destination for large-scale solar.

Despite having a high penetration of rooftop solar, Australia boasts just one “large scale” solar plant of 10MW – which was built using First Solar technology in Geraldton, Western Australia last year. Construction has begun on a 20MW plant at Royalla, near Canberra, as part of the ACT government’s solar program, and two other 7MW and 13MW plants will also be built.

The Gatton plant will use 34,000 First Solar CdTe thin-film modules, while First Solar will also provide engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) services.