Refurbished wind turbines to help power W.A. garnet mine

One Step Off The Grid

A first-of-its kind 3.5MW hybrid wind, solar and battery storage project is set to power a remote garnet mine in Western Australia, after getting a funding boost from the Australian Renewable Energy Agency.

ARENA announced on Wednesday that it was providing $3 million in funding to the Port Gregory Wind and Solar Farm, to build the grid-connected wind, solar and lithium-ion battery project near Kalbarri, on the WA coast north of Geraldton.

The ground-breaking project is using five second-hand Enercon wind turbines for the 2.5MW of wind power, alongside 1MW of solar and a 2MW/0.5MWh lithium-ion battery.

The battery is manufactured by Kokam – which supplied the battery at the ground-breaking Mt Newman gas station further to the north – and battery inverters by Siemens.

All this will ultimately provide up to 70 per cent of the electricity needs of a garnet mining and processing operation run by GMA Garnet, next to which the hybrid power plant will be built.

The $11.2 million project has been in the works for a couple of years now, since GMA Garnet signed a long-term power purchase agreement with Perth-based Advanced Energy Resources for the output of the hybrid renewables plant, back in June 2017.

The plan has been for AER – a renewables developer, generator and electricity retailer – to build, own and operate the site for 13 years, after it is commissioned in December.

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