The 20 megawatt plant in Barcaldine is one of first in the country to be funded by Australian Renewable Energy Agency

This article is more than 3 years old

This article is more than 3 years old

Queensland’s largest operating solar farm has plugged into the national electricity grid and is set to generate enough power for almost 10,000 households by the end of 2016.

The Barcaldine remote community solar farm, in the state’s central west outback, connected to the national electricity market on Wednesday, more than a month ahead of schedule.

The early delivery of the 20 megawatt plant, one of the first in the country to be funded by the Australian Renewable Energy Agency, was evidence of the growing speed and proficiency of big solar developers, said Arena’s chief executive, Ivor Frischknecht.

It is to be followed by a dozen new large-scale solar farms to be built across Australia by the end of 2017, which would ramp up national solar capacity to enough power for 150,000 average homes.

Those plants – six in Queensland, five in New South Wales and one in Western Australia – would be the fruits of an Arena funding program expected to “unlock almost $1bn in commercial investment and boost regional economies”, Frischknecht said.

The Barcaldine plant developer, Elecnor – one of a number of Spanish companies invested in Australian solar – is a transnational corporation with interests from gas and rail to aerospace. Elecnor was backed by $22.8m in funding commitments by Arena and $20m in loans from the federal government’s “green bank”, the Clean Energy Finance Corporation.

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Barcaldine’s mayor, Rob Chandler said the project, which features 78,000 solar panels, had “enthusiastic supporters” in a local community that saw “the great benefits it can bring to outback communities like ours”.

“If it’s one thing we have a lot of it’s sun so it’s great to see it being harnessed to power the electricity grid.”

Frischknecht said: “As well as generating clean energy, the project is demonstrating how project developers can monetise network benefits and ultimately how solar farms can improve network efficiency and reliability at the edge of the grid.”

Elecnor’s business developer manager, Manuel Lopez-Velez, said the Barcaldine solar farm would generate about 57,000 megawatt hours a year, “an energy consumption equivalent to approximately 9,800 households”.

Arena has committed $1.1bn in funding to developers of more than 270 renewable energy projects, who are expected to at least match that investment.

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This includes $20m to Origin Energy’s 107 megawatt Darling Downs solar farm at Dalby, set to be Australia’s largest operating plant by the end of next year.

Another project, Genex Power’s 50 megawatt Kidson solar farm west of Townsville, will be built on an old goldmine site.

The largely coal-fired national electricity market – which excludes WA and the Northern Territory – has a total generating capacity of 45,000 megawatts, supplying 200m megawatt hours a year to about 9m customers.

The energy sector is Australia’s largest source of carbon pollution, making up 35.4% of total emissions (186m tonnes of CO2) in 2014.