Exciting news for the city of Sydney. Lord Mayor Clover Moore has been actioning plans to turn Sydney into a city which – for a large part – runs off renewable energy.
These plans have been kicked up a gear with the city’s first industrial-sized Tesla Powerpack battery installation.
The Alexandra Canal Transport depot – which is now home to the solar and battery installation – is not the city’s largest installation of solar. Where this site will house 1,600 solar panels, the Sydney Markets in Flemington are powered by nearly 8,600 panels. However, this site will be the first to employ the use of a battery capable of storing 500-kilowatt hours of energy.
This project has been modelled off the massive Tesla battery unit that is being used to store energy generated by South Australia’s renewable energy sources.
The Alexandra Canal site project is just part of the city’s wider push towards greater sustainability. Sydney is working towards a target of 50% of all electricity in the city, coming from renewables by 2030.
“To help us achieve that target, we’re covering the roofs of our properties with as many solar panels as possible. By mid-2021, we expect to have more than 7800 solar panels on the roofs of our properties. As the mix of storage and generation on our electricity grid changes, solar solutions like this could provide reliability and resilience to our electricity network and potentially prevent blackouts,” Ms Moore told Fairfax Media.
This site is expected to generate enough energy to power 50 homes for an entire day. It will also act to reduce the demand on the grid during peak times and cutting power costs. This installation is also expected to classify the site as carbon neutral, saving about 600 tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions annually.
This first installation is part of a wider trial that aims to install 1.5 megawatt hours of battery storage in council buildings across Sydney.
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