A 1.6MW solar array installed at one of Australia’s leading star-gazing facilities has this week been joined by storage, with 2.6MWh of battery storage delivered to the Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory, in outback Western Australia.
The battery system – pictured above, en route to the MRO, approximately 800km northeast of Perth, by project developers Carnegie Clean Energy – is being described as Australia’s largest.
Carnegie said on Thursday that the batteries, along with a 1.6MW solar inverter, were now undergoing on-site installation and integration with the previously installed PV array, and were expected to be commissioned in the coming months.
EMC, which is now wholly owned by Carnegie, was appointed by the CSIRO to engineer, procure and construct the power station at the MRO in 2015.
The complex and remote job included the dea custom-built inverter room, designed to protect the CSIRO’s radio telescopes from interference and to preserve its quiet environment.
Among the telescopes the solar system will be powering is CSIRO’s Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) – one of the most powerful survey radio astronomy instruments on the planet.
“These are the largest batteries ever designed and assembled in Australia, which will be used to power one of the most sophisticated telescopes globally,” Carnegie said in its ASX release on Thursday.
Sophie is editor of One Step Off The Grid and editor of its sister site, Renew Economy. Sophie has been writing about clean energy for more than a decade.
