City of Sydney Switches to 100% Green Power
From 1 July, The City of Sydney is being powered using 100 per cent renewable electricity, generated from wind and solar farms in New South Wales in Australia. All the City’s operations including street lights, pools, sports fields, depots, buildings and the historic Sydney Town Hall will now be run on 100 per cent renewable electricity from locally-sourced clean energy. The switch is projected to save the City up to half a million Australian dollars a year over the next 10 years and reduce C02 emissions by around 20,000 tonnes a year, the equivalent to the power consumption of more than 6,000 households.
Lord Mayor of the City of Sydney Ms Clover Moore said the new agreement will generate jobs, support communities impacted by the Covid-19 pandemic and create new opportunities in drought-affected regional NSW. She said “We are in the middle of a climate emergency. If we are to reduce emissions and grow the green power sector, all levels of government must urgently transition to renewable energy. Cities are responsible for 70 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions worldwide, so it is critical that we take effective and evidence-based climate actions.”
Around three-quarters of the power will be wind-generated, and the remaining quarter by solar. The project will see the City source renewable energy from three different generators - the Bomen Solar Farm in Wagga Wagga, Sapphire Wind Farm near Inverell and the Shoalhaven solar farm in Nowra.
The Shoalhaven project is being developed by Flow Power in partnership with local community group Repower Shoalhaven, a not for profit volunteer community enterprise that develops community solar projects. On completion, the 3-megawatt Shoalhaven solar farm will have around 10,000 panels and generate enough energy to power 1,500 homes.
Owned by the Australian-listed company, Spark Infrastructure, the 120MW Bomen Solar Farm has more than 310,000 solar panels on 250 hectares of land. It is one of the first projects in Australia to use bi-facial panels that absorb sunlight on both sides, with tracking technology that shifts each panel throughout the day to capture the sun’s energy.
The Sapphire Wind Farm near Inverell is the largest wind farm in NSW, with a 270MW capacity generated by 75 turbines that stand 200 metres high. It is partly owned by CWP Renewables
The City of Sydney became carbon neutral in 2007 and was the first in Australia to be certified carbon neutral in 2011. This new deal will see t reach our 2030 target of reducing emissions by 70 per cent by 2024, six years early.
Source : Strategic Research Institute