It’s the middle of winter. It’s cold, it’s dark, and in an isolated paddock along Back Trundle Road about 10 kms west of Parkes, famous for its telescope, a solar farm is doing something that no other large scale PV facility has done before: It’s sending its stored PV power into Australia’s main grid, at 10 pm in the evening.
It seems remarkable, but 14 years after the country’s first grid-scale solar project was connected to the grid, the Quorn Park solar hybrid facility, developed and owned by Potentia Energy, has become the first large scale solar-battery hybrid to be built in Australia’s main grid behind a single connection point.
The project is relatively small, and combines just 80 MW of solar and 19.8 MW, 39.6 MWh of battery storage – but it is very much a landmark project for the future of Australia’s main grid.
There are now virtually no large standalone solar projects being built in Australia, but several dozen solar-battery hybrids either already under construction, or sorting through the final details of their contracts and finances. Even wind farms are thinking about installing batteries next to individual turbines.
Most of these new solar-hybrid projects will be exponentially bigger than Quorn Park, including Potentia’s own Tallawang facility, about 200 kms from Quorn Park, which is looking at combining 500 MW of solar and 500 MW of battery capacity, and up to 2,000 MWh of storage.
