A landowner-led 250MW solar-plus-storage site in Tasmania has been added to Australia’s Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation (EPBC) Act.
The Weasel Solar Farm project will be located 9km north of Bothwell in the centre of the state and near the River Clyde. It will be connected to the National Electricity Market (NEM) and within the T3 Tasmania Midlands proposed renewable energy zone (REZ).
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The Downie family from Dungrove and the Bowden family from Weasel Plains are proposing the project in collaboration with Alternate Path, an energy consultancy based in Victoria.
The site’s solar PV element will have a generation capacity of up to 250MW, and the co-located battery energy storage system (BESS) will be 144MW/576MWh in size and occupy a 3-hectare area.
Documents submitted to the EPBC Act said the BESS will include installing individual battery units and inverters similar in size and shape to a standard 20-foot shipping container. These units will be on an engineered hardstand surface.
The solar PV power plant will feature up to 4,000 single-axis tracking PV modules installed over 270 hectares of land. The plant’s layout will enable the continuation of agricultural practices, principally sheep grazing, in what is known as ‘agrivoltaics’.
Alongside agrivoltaics, the project developers have stated their desire to ensure forestry practices can continue in the vicinity to “generate significant social and economic benefits for the local community, surrounding landowners, and the state of Tasmania.”
The proposed project also includes the construction of a 33kV to 22kV substation and a 220kV switchyard within the BESS site. At the start of operation, the switchyard is expected to be transferred to TasNetworks, a state-owned transmission company. This will connect the solar-plus-storage site to the wider NEM.
The project’s anticipated operational lifespan is 30 to 40 years. At the end of its tenure, the plant will be decommissioned.
ACLE Services secures EPC contract for 120MWh BESS in Queensland
In other news, Australia-based engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) firm ACLE Services has won a contract to deliver a 60MW/120MWh 2-hour duration BESS at a 200MW solar PV power plant in Queensland.
ACLE Services will deliver the BESS at the already operational Blue Grass Solar Farm in the Western Downs region of Queensland, which is owned by Spanish solar PV developer X-Elio. According to PV Tech, the Blue Grass plant was the best-performing Australian utility-scale solar PV plant in 2024 in terms of AC capacity factor.
According to a LinkedIn post, ACLE will be involved in several aspects of the project, from civil engineering to electrical work.
Brenton Moratto, co-founder and director of ACLE Services, said that the organisation hopes to achieve mechanical completion of the project in late 2025.
Blue Grass Solar Farm’s BESS will feature advanced inverters that enable grid-forming functions. These will enable it to perform essential grid services, including inertia and voltage support, which have traditionally been provided by centralised thermal power plants.
For X-Elio, it marks the company’s first hybrid solar-plus-storage plant that it will build in Australia, although it has others in its development pipeline. The developer is behind several new solar-plus-storage projects in the country, such as a proposed 2,880MWh BESS that will be encompassed in the North Burnett Renewable Energy Hub, located 140km southwest of Gladstone, Queensland.
Both of these articles first appeared on our sister site, Energy-Storage.news, as the items ‘Landowner-led 576MWh solar-plus-storage site in Tasmania submitted to Australia’s EPBC Act’ and ‘Quinbrook pens 1,010MWh offtake agreement with Stanwell for Supernode BESS in Australia’.
