Solar has taken a big bite out of Queensland coal’s lunch, now wind is eating into its midnight snack

It has been pretty well established that solar – just as the Queensland state owned coal generators had predicted more than a decade ago – has taken a multi-gigawatt bite out of the fossil generators’ midday lunch, as it has in most other state grids.

Now, however, the state owned coal generators in Australia’s most coal dependent grid are having their midnight snack steady eaten away, courtesy of the slow ramp up of two giant new wind projects, including the biggest in Australia to date.

Queensland hosted one of the country’s first wind farms at the appropriately named Windy Hill in 2,000 – all 12 megawatts of capacity – and then added nothing in terms of wind energy for nearly two decades.

It has since 2018 added five new fully operating wind farms – Mt Emerald (180 MW), Kennedy (43 MW), Dulacca (180 MW), Kaban (156 MW), and Cooper’s Gap (452 MW) – but they still only accounted for less than 5 per cent of total generation in the state grid in the last 12 months.

That is starting to change as the new 923 MacIntyre wind project – which will be the country’s biggest until overtaken by the second stage of the Golden Plains wind farm in Victoria – and Andrew Forrest’s 450 MW Clarke Creek wind farm work through their commissioning phases. The two projects alone will more than double the state’s wind capacity.

On Tuesday morning, at 1.30am, with the help of these two, till partially commissioned, new wind projects, and also with the existing wind farms working at solid capacity, wind energy posted a new output record of 1,096.7 MW, and a new record share of 19.3 per cent of the state’s generation, according to GPE NEMLog.

That’s significant, because wind energy is particularly well correlated to the Sunshine state’s vast solar resources – both household and large scale. Wind in Queensland blows mostly at night (see graph of the last week above), and is considered a vital part of the country’s target of 82 per cent renewables by 2030.

However, the new LNP state government has made it clear it really doesn’t like wind, and it doesn’t like renewables much at all. It has vowed to scrap the state’s targets of 50 per cent renewables by 2030 and 80 per cent by 2035, and has doubled down on fossil fuels by extending the life of its ageing coal fired generators and by building more gas.

In the meantime, those coal fired generators had better learn how to dance. They are already tip-toeing around the solar surge in the middle of the day, when they are forced to ramp down their output to accommodate rooftop solar.

They will soon will have to learn a few more steps at night time to accommodate the output of the two new wind projects, and others projects that are also under construction such as the 285 MW Lotus Creek and the 500 MW Wambo wind projects.

Rio Tinto also wants the 1.4 GW Bungaban wind project built to help guarantee – along with some gigawatt scale solar and battery projects – the future of the state’s biggest energy consumers, the aluminium smelters and refineries in Gladstone.

Rio Tinto has made it very clear that those smelters and refineries have no future beyond 2030 if forced to rely on ageing, expensive, dirty and unreliable fossil fuel generation. The state LNP government, and their federal counterparts who wish to follow the same track on a national scale, has yet to fully absorb that message.

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