Change Today for Tomorrow | Megapack
We’re in Collie right now. This is Mari Farm and we’re about 200 km from Perth which is known as the most isolated city in the world because of our remoteness and self-reliance. We’re working very hard to try and mitigate effects of climate change, which is why we’re obviously so supportive of renewable energy happening here in our our local area because the weather and our climate are what us farmers need to make our business work. If global warming continues and our water resources continue to shrink, then we are at the front line of that climate impact. The battery has given us a lot of scope and opportunity to start regenerating land and improving our soil health to restore some of that natural resilience. And that’s something that we’re very happy about. Hi, my name is Florian Pop. So, we’re on my farm which was first established in 1901 after coal was discovered in Collie and has been a sheep farm for the last 100red years and we think it’s one of the most beautiful places on earth. Um, we really are fortunate to be in such a isolated yet beautiful and natural part of the world. We’re in Coll at Lake Stockton which is a beautiful restored coal pit which has been turned into a lake and a campground and this is where the story of energy began in Collie in 1896 roughly uh a reward was offered to find coal in Western Australia and if we look around here we can see literally lumps of coal sticking out of the ground everywhere. This is coal. Um so we literally have we are standing on coal. So since the discovery of coal in Collie energy has had a a very exciting and long and proud history here uh with obviously the the Collie or the MUA power station being built in 1960 and since then Collie has supplied the Southwest grid with our coal energy. I think it’s a breath of fresh air to see a project like this come to fruition. We’ve certainly found that the process between the developer Neoen, the contractors, UGL, the suppliers, Tesla has been exemplary. Um, I mean to get a project like this up and running in 18 months is unheard of. We partnered with Tesla to build poly one and poly 2 using mega pack batteries. We also partnered with Western Power to connect to the southwest interconnected system. Collie battery is currently the largest fully commissioned battery in Australia providing reliable energy source to Western Australians. Stages one and two of Koli battery is now delivering 560 megawatt or over 2 GT of storage helping to support WA’s grid. The KI battery is a great example of the whole state of Western Australia moving towards a more renewable grid. It’s one of the first batteries at utility scale to be deployed in the region and it is part of the state government’s plan to retire the coal power plants and replace them with renewable generation. Australia has one of the highest penetrations of rooftop solar power in the world. While Australia is the second largest gas exporter in the world and the largest coal exporter in the world, we forget that those resources are tiny compared to the natural energy that we have in this country. So, I mean, if you can find a cloud in the sky today, let me know. Um, right now here in WA, the energy price is negative and you can hear the mega packs around us charging from that negative pricing. Now what’s driving that negative pricing is prolific rooftop solar. So over 2 gawatt today is being exported to the network with a demand of less than four. So over half of WA’s energy right now is coming from rooftop solar. Over the last 40 years here on the farm, we have seen a 30% reduction in rainfall. We are seeing the increase in temperature and our landscape is changing and our land needs care. So hopefully we will see many more of these batteries to actually have a larger impact on our global emissions to make sure that we can continue to grow food in a very fast changing environment. The coal mining and energy industry employs the vast proportion of Collie residents. So replacing coal and the energy industry here has been a major challenge for the area. But we’ve certainly seen a change within our community of hope and a light at the end of the tunnel and a future vision of Collie which 5 to 10 years ago was very difficult. And these battery projects really have driven that.
In Western Australia’s South West, 2.2 GWh of Tesla Megapacks are now powering Neoen’s Collie Battery 1 and 2. Host landowner and farmer, Florian Popp reflects on Collie’s transformation from a coal mining hub to a clean energy future.
Learn more – https://www.tesla.com/megapack
