The largest rooftop solar panel system in Australia has been unveiled at the University of Queensland.
Five thousand solar grids, which have been installed on four buildings at the university’s St Lucia campus, are collectively the size of one-and-a-half football fields.
UQ physicist Paul Meredith said the $7.75 million solar generating system would produce about 5 per cent of the university’s peak power demand, which is enough to power 800 households at once.
Professor Meredith, of the Global Change Institute, said the polycrystalline silicon solar panels position UQ as a leader in solar power research.
“It’s a very, very valuable piece of research infrastructure,” he said.
“It is globally significant - I only know of a small handful of universities around the world that have anything like this and it really positions us, as the University of Queensland, as a really a major research provider in solar energy.”
The 1.22 megawatt solar panel array is almost 25 per cent larger than Australia’s second largest flat-panel system – the one megawatt installation at the Adelaide Showgrounds that was built in 2010.
And it is more than double the size of the 500 kilowatt system installed at the Sydney Theatre Company, under the leadership of actor and director Cate Blanchett.
“The system will be part of a larger micro-grid strategy to use renewable energy across the university’s other campuses over the next decade,” Professor Meredith said.
Premier Anna Bligh, whose government invested $1.5 million in the project, said it would be a globally significant research facility to provide scientists with real life data on energy management and the impact of solar on the electricity network.
“Information from projects at a commercial scale is vital to improving the performance of solar energy and to encourage its uptake by both the private sector and the public,” she said.
Through a partnership with Brisbane company RedFlow, a 200 kilowatt battery will be connected to a 339 kilowatt section of UQ’s solar array to allow research into solar power capture techniques during the day and feeding it into the grid at night and other times of peak demand.
