Bringing one of Australia's largest solar farms onto the electricity grid

Client challenge

Our client commissioned Vysus Group, to support the registration, commissioning and model validation stages of a Solar farm project, located in New South Wales (NSW), Australia. The project is expected to reach full commercial operations by the end of 2021, allowing the plant to export its full 260MW AC output (approx.) to the grid, ensuring affordable, secure and reliable energy to Australian consumers. The project is situated in an region which is considered a weak area of the Australian grid. Coupled with the stringent requirements placed by grid operators, this has resulted in many other solar farms in the region finding it challenging to connect to the grid.

How we helped

We supported the plant's registration with the Australian Energy Market Operator by undertaking relevant specialised studies and assessments to confirm compliance of the plant with its agreed performance standards (which allowed the plant to start generating power into the grid) and are currently supporting in-service compliance testing with key analysis, assessments and interfacing with the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) to ensure full compliance with the agreed performance standards.

Over the last decade, the grid connection team at Vysus Group, have helped clients connect utility scale solar farms, wind farms and batteries to the grid worldwide, ranging in size from 5MW up to 1200MW; supporting the development of over 11GW renewable energy projects which is approximately 33% of Australia's total energy demand.

Powerful results

We supported our client in successfully registering their plant with AEMO, which allowed the plant to start generating power into the grid in a timely manner. We worked in collaboration with the network service provider and AEMO to assess the plant’s performance and produced comprehensive assessment reports to ensure that the plant performance matched the modelling. These allowed the plant to remain in operation and not be a risk to power system security.

We’ve been able to provide confidence to our client due to our extensive experience in renewable energy projects, helping them overcome hurdles and minimising costly delays to generation. The registration of this solar farm highlights Australia’s commitment and capability for a low carbon energy future. There is a growing coalition of solar farm operators, energy developers and technical experts in Australia suggesting that the country has a comparative advantage in good solar resources, which could drive a large industry supplying both domestic and offshore customers.