Pacific Energy has inked a deal with mining company Gold Fields today (18 October) to develop its largest solar PV power plant at a gold mine in Western Australia.
Pacific Energy, a distributed energy company, will deliver a 35MW solar PV power plant at the Gold Fields’ St Ives mine site, located around 80km south of Kalgoorlie in Western Australia’s Eastern Goldfields region.
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The solar PV power plant will be accompanied by a 42MW wind farm, being developed in conjunction. Both make up the AU$296 million (US$198.51 million) St Ives Renewables Project, which aims to power the mine site using upwards of 70% renewable energy and will reduce the mine’s carbon emissions by about 50% by 2030.
Jamie Cullen, Pacific Energy’s chief executive, said the solar PV power plant will be the largest the company has been commissioned to deliver.
“Gold Fields is taking firm steps to significantly reduce its Scope 1 and 2 emissions by 2030, and we’re committed to helping them achieve this. Our engineers have factored in scalability to the solar design so that Gold Fields could expand its solar contribution almost immediately if it needed to,” Cullen said.
“A key lesson we’ve learned over the years is that the design needs to be flexible and account for the rapid changes we’re seeing in the renewable energy transition.”
Pacific Energy will commence civil work on the solar PV power plant in November this year and expects it to be fully operational in 2026.
Readers of PV Tech will be aware that Pacific Energy penned a 20-year power purchase agreement (PPA) with Horizon Power, Western Australia’s energy provider, that would see Exmouth run on 80% solar PV-derived renewable energy in the Gascoyne region.
As part of the project, a new hybrid system would be developed comprising a 9.6MW solar PV power plant, a 49.6MWh battery energy storage system (BESS), and a 7MW gas power station.
