One of Australia’s largest renewable energy projects is one step closer to being built after securing environmental approval from the federal government.
The Clarke Creek wind farm will be built by Lacour Energy in Queensland at a cost of around A$1 billion. It will be integrated with a solar energy and battery energy storage facility and construction could start in 2019, Lacour says.
The project gained state planning approval in June 2018. Lacour will partner with Goldwind on the project.
Lacour Energy director Mark Rayner said: “The project has now received federal government approval under the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act. Earlier this year, the wind farm project received Queensland government planning approval for up to 195 wind turbines and approval was earlier secured for a 400 MW solar farm and a large utility scale battery.
“The combination of wind, solar and battery represents a very large-scale integrated renewables power station located at one of the strongest locations of the Queensland power system – no grid extension is required. Importantly, the wind resource is night biased, complementing daytime solar production.”
