Cubbie Solar Farm | Solar Power in Resources

Cubbie Solar Farm – Nasdaw listed company VivoPower said this Monday that its wholly owned Australia subsidiary, Aevitas, has been chosen to build the solar project at Cubbie Station in South West Queensland.

Cubbie Solar Farm

Cubbie Solar Farm
Cubbie Solar Farm (source: cubbie.com.au)

Cubbie Station, located in Dirranbandi in South West Queensland, is the largest irrigation property in the southern hemisphere and as such has very significant power and water requirements. Since January 2013, the Cubbie Ag property group is owned by CS Agriculture Pty Ltd. The major stakeholder of this company is Ruyi Australia Group, who manage Australian operations on behalf of Ruyi Group, a Chinese multinational company.  They’ve been spending this year working on getting a solar farm up which will be able to supply around 40% of the station’s power requirements during its peak season (April to September). 

Stage 1 of the project will involve the creation of  3.5MWDC Solar Farm Non-export generation – to do this ~9,800 solar panels will need to be mounted onto a fixed structure and wired through to the inverter. Aevitas Group Limited was awarded the EPC (Engineering design, Procurement and Construction) contract last week, as per a press release posted on the Nasdaq website

Cubbie Ag have a plan for the future as well – they are aiming to provide power to Dirranbandi and St George as the project grows and generates more renewable energy. According to One Step Off The Grid, their goal is to expand the solar farm to 7.2MW and also add battery storage to it.

Solar power in resources and commercial solar have both been growing in leaps and bounds (and often in conjunction) so it’s exciting to see more of these projects coming to fruition. Solar power for farms and business are popping up very frequently. 

The Cubbie Solar Farm is expected to commence construction in October and will be operable by the end of the year.

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Collie Solar Farm to power data centre/crypto mining

An application has been made for a Collie solar farm to be built in the coal-mining town in Western Australia. Approval for a 20MW solar farm has been obtained and the power will be used to mine cryptocurrencies and power a data centre.

Collie Solar Farm – Approval

Collie Solar Farm
Collie Solar Farm (source: wikipedia)

According to RenewEconomy, the application was made by Hadouken Pty Ltd, which is a company run by Ben Tan (of Tesla Holdings and VivoPower fame). Last Tuesday the Joint Development Assessment Panel approved the project which will be built on rural property around 2km north of Collie. The farm will be located on 18 hectares at 323 Patstone Road, near the Western Power Collie sub-station – not far from the Muja Power Station.

The Collie solar farm will be used to run the algorithms which mine cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, Litecoin and Ethereum. This is a power-intensive exercise and we’ve already seen quite a lot of solar-powered mining rigs – but this seems to be the largest in Australia so far. 

The Collie Mail are reporting that five banks of fixed-tilt modules will create the 20MW, which will cost around $16m and may include energy storage either at launch or post project completion.

“Approval and implementation of the proposal will also be a positive contribution towards establishing a greater presence of the renewable energy sector within the Shire of Collie,” the approved application stated.

 “The proposal will assist the State in meeting growing energy demand (particularly with Synergy accelerating its closure of the Muja AB coal-fired power station) and will be a significant move towards a presence of the renewable energy sector in the district.”

 
If you’re interested in reading the notes of the meeting where they approved the farm please click here to access them. There is also an email in there which shows residents of Patstone Road complaining about the project and location, worried about the ‘eye sore’ (sic) and a seemingly impending ‘disastrous situation’ if the farm is approved. It’s great to see councils not bending to this sort of NIMBY pressure we hear about every time a solar project is approved. 

 

 

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