Australian wind project scales back for hybrid plan

Australian renewables project developer Renewable Energy Partners (REP) has announced the scaling back of a planned 5GW wind farm, which will become a hybrid wind, solar and storage project instead.

Nearly two years after announcing early-stage plans to develop up to 5GW of wind south-east of Hughenden, in Flinders Shire, Queensland, REP re-launched the plans for the Bogunda Energy Hub.

The Bogunda Energy Hub will see the 5GW of wind scaled back to 850MW of wind generation capacity, which will now by paired with 500MW of solar energy and a 500MW / 4 hour Battery Energy Storage System (BESS).

The project is expected to be fully operational by 2032, at which point it will deliver power to over 500,000 Queensland households.

The project is currently in the early stages of development, with strategies being developed to guide planning and EPBC approvals, as well as connection options.

According to REP, the site will be situated close to Powerlink’s CopperString project, a $5 billion, 840-kilometer high-voltage electricity transmission line connecting Mount Isa to the Queensland SuperGrid near Townsville. The project will connect Northwest Queensland to the National Electricity Market (NEM), enabling the connection of renewable energy zones in the region.

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Its close proximity to this infrastructure, says REP on the website, “supports an efficient grid connection and helps reduce the need for additional transmission investment.”

When the Queensland government purchased the CopperString project, it generated a great deal of market confidence for a project the size of the original 5GW.

However, at the time REP announced its large-scale plans, Flinders Shire Council Mayor Kate Peddle said the news came as a surprise, adding that potential impacts on the environment and infrastructure would be a concern: "The water, the sewerage, the impacts on our hospitals, with the benefit there's also a lot of pressure that comes with housing the people that are coming our way".

"These are all conversations we are having with the renewable energy projects that are attempting to come online with CopperString, and that's our role," she concluded.