The Cultana Solar Farm project on a 1100ha site north of Whyalla on the Eyre Peninsula is the first large scale project in billionaire industrialist Sanjeev Gupta’s plan to generate one gigawatt of dispatchable renewable energy in South Australia. SIMEC Energy Australia is part of Gupta’s GFG Alliance and is launching the project through an Engineer, Procure and Construction (EPC) partnership with Shanghai Electric. Marc Barrington, the SIMEC CEO, said final regulatory approvals and a transmission connection agreement were expected in the coming months with the financial close on track for the July Quarter of this year. Additionally, he stated that the planned 13-15 month construction period could then commence straight away with potential completion by the end of 2021.
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The site is to the north of GFG’s Whyalla Steelworks and is set to accommodate 780,000 solar panels capable of generating 600GWh of energy generation per year, enough to power 96,000 households. The proposition will also use a new technique during construction where the ground is rolled flat to allow the panels to be installed rather than graded to remove all vegetation. The technique was developed by Glenn Christie from Succession Ecology, a company based in the South of Australia, and proved during testing at Cultana in December of 2018. Barrington said maintaining vegetation and biodiversity was not the only benefit as the groundcover helped suppress dust, which had caused problems at other arid zone solar farms.
British billionaire Sanjeev Gupta started investing in South Australia in 2017 when he bought the struggling Whyalla Steelworks from Arrium and announced the Cultana Solar Farm as part of his one‐gigawatt dispatchable renewable energy program in August 2018. He has also announced a A$600 million plan to expand and modernise the Whyalla Steelworks. There will be up to 750 jobs on that site at its peak and we hope it has a really good benefit to the community when it starts
