RES reveals plans for huge Queensland wind farm and battery

UK renewables giant RES has unveiled new plans for a potentially huge wind farm and big battery in Australia, this time in the South Burnett region of Queensland, around 200km inland from the Sunshine Coast.

The Iron Leaf wind farm is being proposed by RES for development on grazing land in Ironpot, which is 30km west of Kingaroy, on a site selected for its “excellent” wind resource and strategic location on the existing local grid.

There are few details about the project’s proposed capacity, as yet, but the wind farm’s website says early plans are for up to 151 turbines, electrical substations and a containerised battery energy storage system.

This will almost certainly be subject to change over the course of planning and approvals, but assuming all 151 turbines were approved, and assuming those turbines were the same size (5.5MW) as its Murra Warra project in Victoria, Iron Leaf could be around 800MW.

For now, however, the project is in its very early stages, with RES announcing a series of community consultation meetings in early May to brief locals in the region about the plans.

Following that, RES says it will submit a planning application to the Queensland State Assessment and Referral Agency (SARA) for the wind farm later in 2022, with construction planned to commence in 2024. You can see the details for the community meetings here.

The announcement of the new project continues a strong start to 2022 from RES, following the news in February that the company had doubled its renewables asset management portfolio in Australia after the acquisition of Sydney firm, Blueshore.

Blueshore, which provides commercial, technical and financial asset management services for solar and wind projects, has built up a portfolio of 1.6GW since its launch in 2017 and become one of the largest independent asset managers in Australia.

Among its assets it counts the Royalla Solar Farm, south of Canberra, which is small, but boasts the title of the first utility-scale solar farm to connect to Australia’s National Electricity Market in 2014.

Among RES’ existing Australian projects under development is the 209MW second stage of the Murra Warra wind farm in western Victoria which, as noted above, is installing some of the largest wind turbines in Australia, with the GE Cypress 5.5-158.

And in August of last year it unveiled plans for a 315MW wind farm, a 62.5MW solar farm and a 400MW/1200MWh big battery near Stawell in western Victoria.

The Watta Wella renewable energy hub would be located close to the Bulgana sub-station, and the three hour battery would provide grid services and support more renewable energy capacity in a region that is bursting with wind and solar projects in the pipeline.