Contracts with Northern Territory (NT) electricity retailer Jacana Energy may breathe new life into the 25 MW Katherine solar farm coupled with a 6 MW battery, and the 10 MW-each Batchelor and Manton Dam solar farms, which have been idle for years.
The restated contracts with Italian clean electricity company Plenitude, a subsidiary of oil giant Eni, will see Jacana access 45 MW of solar power to provide reliable clean energy to its customers, for the next decade.
Jacana Energy Chief Executive Officer Rod Hayes said the contracts provide a greater share of renewables to the energy mix at a larger scale than previously seen in the NT.
“At Jacana Energy, we’re about leading smart energy solutions for the Territory,” Hayes said.
“New sources of energy including renewables must be brought into the mix where it makes sense.”
Commissioning delays
The NT government-owned utility Power and Water Corporation (PWC) was initially blamed for the solar farms’ commissioning delays due to its generator performance standards and concerns the solar farm’s output could destabilise the Darwin-Katherine grid.
Hayes said it’s important to consider the system as a whole when bringing on new solar.
“We’re being proactive in this space. The Plenitude contracts are the first large scale step of using solar farms to reduce system costs in the Territory,” Hayes said.
Eni Plenitude Renewables Australia Managing Director Simone Rizzi said that over the past five years, its teams have worked to satisfy the stringent conditions requested by the system controller and are working towards finalising the remaining steps to achieve full export from the three solar farms.
“In the meantime, we are proud to now supply a considerable quota of renewable energy to Territorians,” Rizzi said.
System cost savings
Each of the solar farms at Katherine and Batchelor are now exporting substantial amounts of electricity to the grid as Plenitude works through the remaining challenges to achieve full export levels and also bring Manton Dam to export.
Hayes added that Jacana is focused on lowering the total costs of the energy system and it can make considerable savings in wholesale energy costs through the renewable energy contracts, including the costs of services required to ensure grid stability.
ENI purchased the Katherine Solar Farm in February 2019 from joint venture Australian developer Epuron and UK-based Island Green Power confirming it would be co-located with a 5.7 MVA / 2.9 MWh battery energy storage system (BESS). Jacana had already secured a long-term offtake deal with the facility.
Jacana also signed power purchase agreements (PPAs) with early developer Tetris Energy in April 2019 for the combined $43 million (USD 27 million) Batchelor and Manton Dam projects, and ENI acquired them six months later.
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