Australia’s Largest Solar Project
If I were to travel north-north-west for a few hours, I would exit Melbourne-proper within about an hour (the traffic can be hell!). After that I would slowly make my way up through country-suburbia and enter towns which would like to consider themselves ‘good old fashioned country towns’. I would eventually hit Mildura, where a new solar plant will soon begin to emerge from the ground.
This story was kicked off by this one here at ForeignPolicy.com, where they list several new solar projects going up around the world. Considering that there was one close to home, I decided to focus in on that one.
Expected to cost some $420 million AUD ($270 million USD) the project is being constructed by Hong Kong-owned TRUenergy. The plant – which is planned to begin generating power by 2010, and be completed 2013 – is looking to provide solar power to some 45,000 homes.
The project will avoid an approximate 437,000 tons of annual greenhouse-gas emissions that would have been produced by a coal-fired plant of the same output. But despite the seeming size of this project, the total output will only account for .1 percent of Australia’s electricity generation (according to statistics from 2006).
Solar Systems, self described as ‘the world leader in high concentration solar photovoltaic applications,’ will provide ‘high performance solar cells originally developed to power satellites.’
Solar Systems’ hope is that by 2030 the plant will have installed enough capacity to output over 5 gigawatts of electricity. This would reduce greenhouse emissions by more than 10 million tons a year, and thus exceed the Federal Government’s Low Emissions Technology Demonstration Fund (LETDF).
A happy by-product of the entire process will be the reparation of salinity affected land nearby. Due to the plant’s closed loop water-cooling system, the local area can expect a reduction in salinity issues in the waters.
See Also:
sustainablog: Australia Builds the Largest Solar Plant (for now)
Image Courtesy of Solar Systems
[...] in Australia. By 2030, Mildura may be producing as much as 5 Gigawatts of solar energy. Source: EcoWorldly via Foreign Policy. Photo: Solar [...]