Snowy Hydro is partnering with renewable energy investor and developer Equis to construct a 100MW solar facility with on-site battery storage in Tailem Bend in South Australia.
Snowy Hydro has a power purchase agreement with Equis for the project which will have a combined power and large-scale generation certificates price around 40 per cent less than prevailing South Australian market prices.
Snowy Hydro has agreed to purchase 100 per cent of the power produced from the Tailem Bend Solar Project for at least 22 years.
Snowy Hydro CEO and Managing Director, Paul Broad, said, “This is an exciting opportunity for Snowy Hydro to source renewable generation in South Australia to complement our existing capacity.
“We are pleased to be working with Equis to deliver more renewable energy to South Australia, backed by reliable fast-start thermal capacity. Importantly, this unique generation facility at Tailem Bend is also ‘battery ready’ with the ability to install up to 100MW of large-scale battery storage on the site.”
CEO of Equis, David Russell, said the Tailem Bend solar project represents an exciting expansion into Australia and an unique opportunity for the company to leverage their development and construction expertise to deliver large scale, reliable renewable energy for Australian consumers.
“We are delighted to partner Snowy Hydro on the Tailem Bend solar project to build one of Australia’s lowest cost solar generation projects with a unique “battery-storage ready” design, further enhancing the project’s long term attractiveness as a stable, low cost source of power,” Mr Russell said.
“The solar farm represents a significant investment in South Australia by Snowy Hydro and demonstrates our commitment to growing both our generation business and our Lumo Energy business, which services around 50,000 electricity customers in the state.”
Snowy Hydro currently service over one million gas and electricity customers through their energy retailers Lumo Energy and Red Energy. They also own and operate 5500MW of generation capacity across Australia, including the 4100MW Snowy Hydro-electric Scheme in the Snowy Mountains region of New South Wales.
The Tailem Bend project will mean Snowy Hydro has access to 264MW of generation capacity in South Australia. The company already operates 136MW of thermal capacity at Port Stanvac and Angaston and will add a further 28MW of diesel generation at the Tailem Bend site from 2017.
“We combine the power of the mighty Snowy Scheme with gas and diesel fired peaking generators to deliver a flexible and reliable mix of energy to our growing customer base every day,” Mr Broad said.
Construction of the Tailem Bend solar project is expected to begin in early 2017 and be completed in 2018.
