Trail-blazing community solar and battery project prepares to power up

One of Australia’s first community-funded solar and battery storage projects, the Latitude Solar Farm, is complete and ready for energisation on the New South Wales Essential Energy grid.

The project, combining 4.99MW solar and a 4.99MW/11MWh lithium-ion battery storage system, is named for its location in Boggabilla, which lies at the same latitude as Byron Bay, but around six hours to the west.

Developed by Byron Bay Solar Farm Holdings, the project was first conceived in 2017, and has been realised through a combination of debt, state government grant funding and equity contributed by wholesale and sophisticated investors who live locally in regional NSW.

Project director Craig Johnston, himself a local Byron Shire resident, says the project is currently around one-third community owned. The $3.5 million in grant funding was awarded through the NSW government’s Regional Community Energy Fund.

As well as being one of the first community solar and battery projects to have been completed in Australia, the Latitude Solar Farm is also claiming to have delivered one of the first utility scale battery systems on the NSW Essential Energy network.

“We’re immensely proud of this project and thankful to Byron Shire community groups such as Zero Emissions Byron, Resilient Byron, Enova Community Energy and others for supporting this project,” Johnston said in a statement this week.

“We’re looking forward to delivering the benefits to regional NSW which include grid decarbonisation and improved grid stability.”

Johnston says that with the completion of works on the Latitutde Solar Farm, energisation of the project is now expected to take place on September 16, with the commissioning of its inverters set for October 5 and 6 by Essential Energy.

Following closely behind the Latitiude project is the 4.99MW solar and 4.99MW/5.2MWh battery Orange Community Renewable Energy Park, being developed by ITP Renewables around 6km north-west of the town centre of Orange, also on the Essential Energy grid.

That project got the all-clear for construction in March of 2021 and then in November of the same year opened the door to investors from outside of the local community and allowing anyone in Australia to buy a stake.

The group behind the crowd-funding part of the Orange project, Energy Democracy’s Central West NSW Co-operative, owns a 44% share in the solar farm that it bought with the help of grant funding, also from the NSW government’s Regional Community Energy Fund.