Vestas and Australian renewables company Windlab Ltd. have announced the final details of a utility-scale project integrating wind, solar and storage.
Developed by Windlab with support from Vestas, the 60.2 MW Kennedy Energy Park Phase I is located in Flinders Shire in central north Queensland, Australia, which the partners say is “blessed with world-class wind and solar resources.”
Having secured financing from the Clean Energy Finance Corp. and the Australian Renewable Energy Agency, the partners can now begin construction of the project, which is owned by Kennedy Energy Park Holdings Pty Ltd., a joint venture between Windlab and Eurus Energy Holdings Corp. of Japan.
According to the partners, the facility will be the first wind, solar and storage hybrid generator connected to the Australian national electricity network via a single connection point.
Kennedy will consist of 43.2 MW of wind, 15 MW AC of solar and 4 MWh of lithium-ion battery storage. The project will use 12 Vestas V136 3.6 MW turbines at a hub height of 132 meters, the largest wind turbines yet to be deployed in Australia, says Windlab. The storage will be provided by Tesla.
The project will take a little over 12 months to construct, and it is expected to be fully operational before the end of 2018. The project will create more than 100 local jobs during construction. A consortium between Vestas and Quanta Services will deliver the engineering, procurement and construction.
In order to support further hybrid projects in Australia, Windlab, along with Vestas, will share knowledge from the project with the Australian Renewable Energy Agency. Vestas will also provide a 15-year Active Output Management 4000 service agreement, which includes a full-scope service package for the wind turbines, as well as scheduled maintenance for the solar panels, battery storage and electrical systems.
This project is planned to be the first phase of Windlab’s larger, 1.2 GW Kennedy Energy Park, which seeks to deliver significant benefits to north Queensland and Australia in reduced emissions and sustainable energy generation.
Now the snake-oil salesman Musk is going to make a monkey out of Vestas flogging his silly little useless battery of 4MWh or only 1.3% of what’s needed for a 60MW farm. To supply renewable energy power 24/7/52 from wind and solar, you need energy storage of about 5 hours times the generation capacity, and you need back-up power, from biomass, biogas or hydrogen-to-power. So for this 60MW farm they need energy storage of about 5 hours x 60MW = 300MWh, for a range of system configurations as shown in this Wind Generation Capacity Focus Table http://scottish.scienceontheweb.net/Wind%20power%20storage%20back-up%20calculator.htm?wind=60#wind Wind, storage and… Read more »