Renewable energy records blown away in January as wind farms match coal output

Wind and solar set new production records in January, with new milestones achieved in three different states, and utility scale projects installations in Western Australia setting the lead.

David Dixon, an analyst with Rystad Energy, says that total utility-scale wind and solar PV output in January across the country was 3,628GWh, the highest ever.

The state with the most output was NSW, which provided more than one quarter of that supply with 995GWh of wind and solar, but the individual stars were all to be found in W.A, where wind and solar accounted for 40 per cent of total output in the month.

These included the Badgingarra wind farm, (pictured at top), a facility co-located with a smaller solar installation, that produced a stunning capacity factor of 64 per cent for the month. (The solar output is not included in that figure).

In all, six wind farms in W.A. – Badgingarra, Walkaway, Warradarge, Yandin, Emu Downs and Mumbida, all located north of Perth – delivered capacity factors of more than 50 per cent for the month.

To put that into some context, this is a ranking of the capacity factors of Badgingarra and Australia’s individual coal units in the month of January, again courtesy of Rystad.

Badgingarra sits right in the middle of coal plant performance in Australia, and its output in this past month was not even its best month. In November, 2019, it delivered a capacity factor of more than 70 per cent, according to Rystad.

The only wind farms not located in W.A. that reached the top 10 for the month were the first stage (and much delayed) of the Stockyard Hill wind farm in Victoria, which will be the country’s largest once operating at full capacity, the Kiata wind farm in Victoria and the first stage of the Lincoln Gap wind farm in South Australia.

W.A. was also host to the two best performing solar farms for the month of January – Merredin (at 100MW the state’s biggest) and the newly expanded Greenough River, which was the first large scale solar in the country when the first stage was built in 2012).

While individual solar plants in W.A. performed best, the bulk of the solar output for the month of January came from NSW, which contributed 535GWh, nearly half the 1,202GWh total for the country, followed by Queensland with 362GWh.