A renewable energy company backed by former Australian Football League chairman Mike Fitzpatrick plans to build a batteryready solar power station at Northam in Western Australia worth up to $20 million, the first step in a landmark joint venture with Lendlease.
Late last year Lendlease teamed with Carnegie Clean Energy's (formerly known as Carnegie Wave Energy) subsidiary Energy Made Clean (EMC) to deliver battery, solar, and storage microgrids across Australia.
Microgrids are larger power systems that can be tapped by communities when the power grid goes down. Carnegie is currently one of the three key players bidding for the controversial South Australian battery project, Australia's largest company offering utility scale battery storage. It is also currently assembling the batteries for CSIRO's Square Kilometre Array, the nation's largest utility battery deployment.
The agreement announced in December for Lendlease and EMC to identify, pursue and bid for contracts for solar and battery energy storage systems in Australia has led to them this morning announcing their first privatelyfunded project.
Carnegie will own and operate the 10 megawatt Northam solar power station for at least the next 25 years and said it had the option to sell energy in the Wholesale Electricity Market (WEM), or to deliver Large Scale Generation Certificates (LGC) to third party customers through either direct Power Purchase Agreements (PPA) or their own energy retail license or some combination of both.
The station will cost up to $20m and Carnegie said it was currently in discussions with third party providers of both equity and debt.
"This is the next step in the evolution of Carnegie Clean Energy. The tier 1 capabilities of the EMC Lendlease joint venture combined with the design, development and financing capabilities of Carnegie, provide us with a clear point of difference in the rapidly emerging utility solar market in Australia. Carnegie is planning on replicating this approach across Australia,'' Carnegie's managing director and chief executive officer, Dr Michael Ottaviano said, "The ability to add utility scale battery storage is a new product offering we will integrate into our own solar farms and also to other developers of utility scale solar farms as the technology costs continue to decline in the coming years.
Among Carnegie's shareholders Mr Fitzpatrick's 88 Green Ventures.
Click here to read the full press release.
April 18, 2024
