A plan to power properties in north-west Queensland’s eastern Gulf Country with solar electricity is likely to go ahead, despite cuts to State Government clean energy funds.
Doug Scouller says his energy company, Scouller Energy, is pressing ahead with a plan to build a 10-megawatt solar plant near Normanton, to supply Normanton, Karumba and the surrounding area.
He says the business case for the project is strong enough for it to proceed, even without State Government funding.
“Once we’ve got over our initial capital outlays, the nature of solar - there’s no waste, there’s no ongoing costs, there’s no emissions, there’s no nothing,” he said.
“We will come up with a price that’s going to make the thing more than commercially viable and we can punch on then without the need for us going cap in hand for any major handout.
“I’m certainly not putting that aside completely, because, you know, a handout would be nice.”
Mr Scouller says the eastern Gulf Country’s abundant sunshine makes it ideally suited to generate solar power, despite sometimes severe rainfall during the wet season.
“The amount of solar radiation that hits Australia any given year would supply the whole of Australia’s electricity consumption 10,000 times over,” he said.
“There is a bit of scepticism there and they think that we do need storage but we’ve got a funny situation that when we’re flood-bound, we get sun-bound at the same time.”
