The world’s largest renewable energy plant

Western Green Energy Hub, a renewable energy plant in Australia, has just undergone a capacity upgrade and will produce 70 GW of electricity instead of 50 GW as previously planned. When ready, the project will span an area larger than Slovenia and El Salvador, Interesting Engineering reported on November 12. The Western Green Energy Hub is a wind and solar facility in the Shire of Dundas and Kalgoorlie-Boulder, located in the south-east of Western Australia. The facility will cover an area of ​​2.2 million hectares.

The Western Green Energy Hub will include 60 million photovoltaic panels spread across 35 solar farms to be built in the region. In addition, the project will be equipped with 3,000 wind turbines with capacities ranging from 7 to 20 MW.

The solar farm construction process will take place in 7 phases spanning 3 decades. When ready, the facility will consist of 35 nodes, each with a power generation capacity of 2 – 3 GW, and the total capacity of the project is 70 GW. The facility will produce more than 200 TWh of renewable energy annually, roughly equal to Australia’s current electricity capacity (274 TWh), according to recent estimates.

This project will greatly contribute to Australia’s transition to a clean energy economy by 2050. At full capacity, the estimated cost of the project is $65 billion. Due to the long project duration, contractors are excited to be able to adapt to technological developments in the field of renewable energy for many years to come. While onshore wind turbines typically have a capacity of 7 MW, the Western Green Energy Hub will explore turbine options up to 20 MW.

While the main source of electricity generation remains wind and solar technology, the facility also aims to produce green hydrogen with electrolyzers and related infrastructure. Once phase 1 is completed, the plant will produce 330,000 tons of green hydrogen annually. When the project is fully completed, hydrogen production will increase to 3.5 million tons/year. Another application related to clean energy is the production of green ammonia, mainly for export and use for environmental impact assessment purposes.