French oil giant TotalEnergies has unveiled plans for a massive solar and battery storage facility near Darwin that it says will power heavy industry and potentially green hydrogen projects, and which appears to be a major rival to the better known, and even bigger, SunCable project.
The company, through its recently formed TE H2 venture with Group Eren, is seeking approvals for the 2.7 gigawatt Wak Wak solar farm, along with a 6 gigawatt hour battery, to be located near Humpty Doo, and about 48 kms south of Darwin.
It hopes to begin construction in 2028 on a pastoral lease, but is now undertaking community consultation to get feedback on the layout of the project, and the design of community benefit sharing. It will then submit plans to local and federal authorities.
The scale of the Wak Wak project is not nearly as vast as the SunCable project, located 800 kms to the south with proposals for up to 12 GW of solar and 45 GWh of battery storage, and it appears to have no plans for a sub-sea cable to Singapore or anywhere in Asia.
But it would still be – if built now – by far the biggest solar battery project in the country – and its proximity to Darwin means it is closer to existing and new demand centres that could emerge in new industrial precincts around Middle Arm.
“The solar precinct is expected to supply competitive, reliable, and dispatchable renewable electricity to existing heavy industry in the Northern Territory,” the company says on its TE H2 website.
The company puts the capital cost of the project at just $2.8 billion and also describes it as the first phase of potential larger green hydrogen production and export project on Middle Arm. It may also connect into the Darwin-Katherine grid.
Wak Wak is likely to be developed in stages, with the first stage of roughly up to 900 MWp to take approximately 4 years to build, generating up to 900 jobs during construction.
TE H2 says it has a staff of 20 in Australia working on this and other projects, including a possible wind project called Poynton in the Middleback Ranges near Port Augusta in South Australia, and another 600 MW renewable energy hub in the south-east of the state.
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Giles Parkinson
Giles Parkinson is founder and editor-in-chief of Renew Economy, and founder and editor of its EV-focused sister site The Driven. He is the co-host of the weekly Energy Insiders Podcast. Giles has been a journalist for more than 40 years and is a former deputy editor of the Australian Financial Review. You can find him on LinkedIn and on Twitter.
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