Wooderson Solar Development Co has secured federal environmental approval for a 450MW solar PV power plant with 3,600MWh of co-located battery energy storage in Queensland, Australia.
The Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation (EPBC) Act decision, issued by the Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water (DCCEEW), classified the Wooderson Solar PV power plant as “not a controlled action,” clearing a key regulatory hurdle for the project’s development.
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Located approximately 40km southwest of Gladstone and 20km west of Calliope within the Gladstone Regional Council area, the project emerges from a joint venture between established renewable energy developers RES Australia and Energy Estate through their Central Queensland Power Development Co partnership.
The development spans a project area of 5,618 hectares distributed across 14 individual land parcels and local road corridors, with the actual infrastructure footprint concentrated within a disturbance area of approximately 1,849 hectares.
The battery energy storage component will provide up to 3,600MWh of storage in a DC-coupled configuration.
As Neha Sinha, product manager for energy storage systems at Wärtsilä Energy Storage, told ESN Premium last year, DC-coupled solar-plus-storage projects are becoming increasingly common in Australia due to several advantages over traditional AC-coupled systems, including improved efficiency, reduced equipment costs and enhanced flexibility in energy dispatch.
Solar PV modules will be deployed on both fixed racks and single-axis tracking systems, enabling optimised energy capture across daily and seasonal variations in solar irradiance.
Power conversion systems integrate inverters and transformers within collector boxes distributed across the solar array, while the battery energy storage system incorporates containerised units with DC-DC converters and auxiliary transformers designed for utility-scale grid integration.
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