Solar plant will power Windorah

Courier Mail
Wednesday 20/8/2008 Page: 17

THE power of the sun's rays may soon meet the entire daytime electricity needs of the southwest Queensland town of Windorah. Ergon Energy is spending $2.5 million on a solar farm on the outskirts of town, which has about 100 residents. It says the new facility will generate about 360,000 kilowatt hours of electricity a year and save about 100,000 litres of diesel fuel, which would otherwise be used to power the town's energy requirements.

But an Ergon spokeswoman emphasised yesterday that the project was a trial and there were a "lot of questions to be answered" after it was up and running at the end of this year. The company spent $3 million four years ago building Windorah's existing power plant, which will still be needed at night even if the new facility proves successful. The solar plant will consist of five mirrored dishes about 14.5m high and 13.7m across, which will reflect and concentrate sunlight on to high capacity solar cells.

Some Aboriginal communities in remote South Australia and the Northern Territory are powered by similar solar energy plants. If the new plant was a success Ergon would look at similar plants in other remote parts of western Queensland, the spokeswoman said. She said the advantage of using solar concentrator dishes over conventional rooftop solar panels was that they gave a "high output of electricity for a relatively small piece of real estate". It took about 6.8sqm of conventional panels to produce 1kW but a concentrator dish would take up 14sqm to produce a minimum of 26kW.