Australia’s first renewable energy zone (REZ), the Central-West Orana (CWO), 340 kilometres northwest of Sydney, is closer to delivering electricity to the grid following the granting of a New South Wales (NSW) transmission operator’s licence (TOL) to the ACEREZ Partnership (ACEREZ).
ACEREZ is a consortium of Spain-headquartered renewable energy developers Acciona Concesiones and Cobra, with NSW-based utility Endeavour Energy, and together is the preferred network operator to deliver the CWO-REZ transmission system.
NSW Minister for Energy Penny Sharpe granted the licence, which enables ACEREZ to design, construct, own and operate the CWO-REZ transmission system, connecting renewable energy projects within the 20,000 square kilometre REZ to existing Newcastle, Sydney and Wollongong load centres.
The decision follows the Independent Pricing and Regulatory Tribunal’s (IPART) recommendation ACEREZ be granted the licence and the tribunal will continue to monitor ACEREZ for compliance to licence conditions.
Image: EnergyCo
A ministerial condition s of the licence is ACEREZ must become a member of an external dispute resolution scheme to support social licence.
When operational, the CWO-REZ transmission system will unlock 4.5 GW of network capacity, allowing generation and storage projects to connect at scale.
This is expected to deliver $3 billion (USD 2 billion) in net benefits for NSW energy consumers, drive $20 billion in regional investment and support 5,000 jobs during peak construction.
This content is protected by copyright and may not be reused. If you want to cooperate with us and would like to reuse some of our content, please contact: editors@pv-magazine.com.
By submitting this form you agree to pv magazine using your data for the purposes of publishing your comment.
Your personal data will only be disclosed or otherwise transmitted to third parties for the purposes of spam filtering or if this is necessary for technical maintenance of the website. Any other transfer to third parties will not take place unless this is justified on the basis of applicable data protection regulations or if pv magazine is legally obliged to do so.
You may revoke this consent at any time with effect for the future, in which case your personal data will be deleted immediately. Otherwise, your data will be deleted if pv magazine has processed your request or the purpose of data storage is fulfilled.
Further information on data privacy can be found in our Data Protection Policy.