As part of a significant global drive toward renewable hydrogen, Total Eren, a renewable energy producer partially controlled by the French oil company Total, claims it is considering a huge number of “gigawatt” size renewable projects in Australia.
The 256MW (dc) Kiamal solar farm in Victoria, which the business already owns and runs (seen above), is about to start work on a 192MW (dc) second stage, which will include DC-coupled inverters as well as a nearby huge battery with up to 300MWh of storage.
But, the focus is currently on gigawatt-scale projects that would support green hydrogen manufacturing plants. According to the company, its 40-person team has already identified 30GW of potential generation capacity in Australia.
To put that amount in perspective, it is larger than two of the most well-known large-scale projects, the 20GW Sun Cable project in the Northern Territory and the 26GW Asia Renewable Energy Hub in Western Australia. That amount is equivalent to the installed capacity of large-scale wind and solar in Australia, which has been doubled.
In order to take advantage of several project proposals in the state of Western Australia, Total Eren, which claims that its development pipeline is dispersed throughout a number of states, is opening a new office there.
A green hydrogen development pipeline with up to 30 GW of generation capacity across the Northern Territory, Queensland, South Australia, and WA has been put together over the course of the past 18 months, according to a company statement from its team of more than 40 renewable energy experts in Australia.
When it announced a deal with the Northern Territory government to construct the Darwin H2 Hub, which would include more than 2GW of solar and a 1GW hydrogen electrolyzer, one of those projects was identified from the previous year.
8 GW green hydrogen project with Province
In addition, it announced plans to build the enormous 8 GW HyEnergy green hydrogen project in Western Australia in partnership with the Australian miner Province Resources.
The term sheet between the two businesses was not, however, extended, and Province currently plans to forward that project independently or in collaboration with another company.
The business stated in a statement in February that although Total Eren has a successful track record in the development of renewable energy projects, the Board felt that the company’s goals for the development of the HyEnergy Project were not entirely in line with those of the Province.
Late last year, Total Eren also unveiled plans for a 10 GW wind farm in Chile to help power an 8 GW hydrogen electrolyzer plant, as well as a desalination and ammonia plant. Production on that project is slated to start in 2027.
Pâris Mouratoglou and David Corchia formed Total Eren in 2012, and it currently has more than 3,700MW of operating or planned wind, solar, and hydropower projects throughout the world.
TotalEnergies, a division of the Total group, has been a shareholder in Total Eren since December 2017.
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