The largest intermodal freight and logistics facility in Australia will soon be powered by what’s said to be the country’s largest rooftop solar microgrid.
Solar Bay will install and operate a microgrid at the Moorebank Logistics Park (MLP) in Sydney, Australia. The solar microgrid will include a 60-MW rooftop solar array, a 150-MWh battery energy storage system, and off-site renewable energy sources. It will operate at both 11 kV and 33 kV to meet the different needs of MLP’s tenants.
It is expected that the microgrid will avoid nearly 67.2 kilotons of carbon emissions each year.
MLP’s microgrid will fully power the facility
The entire facility will be powered by 100% renewable energy, according to the LOGOS Consortium, MLP’s owner. The microgrid’s solar array will fully meet the power needs of the facility’s tenants during daylight hours, and an off-site wind farm and other renewable electricity sources will be used when solar is not available.
James Doyle, Solar Bay’s investment director, said the “microgrid facilitates the on-site installation of utility scale solar and batteries, providing tenants with the ability to access a vast amount of renewable electricity that match the scale of their electrified operations.”
Darren Searle, head of LOGOS Australia and New Zealand, said the microgrid “offers substantial opportunity to the tenants of MLP, where they seek to run their own business operations on a carbon-neutral mandate.” It will also allow the consortium to offer long-term electricity supply agreements to its tenants.
Future expansion is expected
LOGOS and Solar Bay have agreed to a 30-year partnership at the MLP facility. The new clean energy infrastructure at MLP will help ensure LOGOS’ operations are running at net-zero emissions by 2040.
The site has capacity to add another 70 MW of solar, which means the system could generate as much as 183 GW of electricity a year, making it not only the largest freight and logistics warehousing infrastructure project in Australia, but the largest rooftop solar installation in the country, according to a statement from the company.
Future expansion will power fast-charging stations for electric trucks, thermal storage, hydrogen generation and supply, and other low emission infrastructure.
MLP microgrid to support the wider community when needed
The microgrid will also be connected to Australia’s National Energy Market (NEM) and will support NEM when required through demand response and the ancillary market.
Searle said, “The impacts of the infrastructure that we will develop with Solar Bay at MLP will extend far beyond the site itself and play a key role in the state, regional and local economies given the size, scale and influence of our market-leading site.”
The MLP microgrid is just one of many new projects announced in Australia this year. Microgrid development in Queensland and Western Australia have also made the news.
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