Name: McCain chips in with renewables at Ballarat plant
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McCain chips in with renewables at Ballarat plant

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Print articleJul 14, 2020 – 12.00amLog in&nbsp;or&nbsp;&nbsp;to save articlePotato chip producer McCain Foods has started installing 17,000 solar panels on the ground and on the roof of the carpark at its main Australian production plant in Ballarat as part of what is thought to be the country's largest "behind the meter" renewable energy system.The system will include a heat and power plant fuelled by biogas produced from potato skins and juice that will complement the solar generation by acting as a sort of battery, powering down during sunlit hours but able to crank into gear overnight.Regional president at Toronto-headquartered McCain, Louis Wolthers, said once both plants were up and running the Ballarat site would be producing almost 40 per cent of its own needs and reduce its carbon emissions by about a third.The project marks a significant step towards McCain's global commitment to reduce its carbon emissions by 50 per cent by 2030, cease any reliance on coal by 2025 and have 100 per cent of its plants powered by renewables by 2030."During daytime hours we basically will be off-grid once the solar power is running, that's on a sunny day when it's at full efficiency," Mr Wolthers told The Australian Financial Review.Advertisement"To get to be totally clean energy, we will have to buy a residue of clean energy from the grid, from a clean energy supplier, because we won’t be able to generate 100 per cent, but this gets us a hell of a long way towards that goal which for us is very exciting."The project, which will cut the site's carbon-dioxide emissions by more than 27,000 tonnes a year, involves 8.2 megawatts of capacity in total, including 1.2MW of biomass and the rest solar.Most of the solar panels will be mounted on the ground, covering 10 hectares of land behind the manufacturing plants, and will have a single-axis system that allows them to track the sun during the day. About 500kW of panels will be mounted on a carpark structure and on a truck flyover at the site entrance.McCain pays no upfront costs for the system, which is to be built and maintained by industrial solar specialist Smart Commercial Solar and is underpinned by a 20-year with Solar Bay, a renewable energy fund backed by a consortium of family offices. The total cost for the project is $24 million, with Solar Bay, which has a $350 million mandate to invest in solar projects across industrial and commercial real estate, funding the solar investment.Mr Wolthers said that while McCain had suffered serious cost increases in the past for energy – forcing the shutdown of a potato processing plant in South Australia in 2013 – cost was not the main driver behind the renewables deal."Subsequently prices have come down and we still continued with this because in the longer term we just wanted to get to a point of carbon neutrality as a business," he said. "So [cost] helped focus our minds a lot faster but it isn’t the overall driving factor."AdvertisementSmart Commercial Solar managing director Huon Hoogesteger said the decline in wholesale power prices would likely drive a slowdown in solar in the commercial space but that his company was one of the few able to offer deals under the cost of network tariffs.The self-generation of 39 per cent of the Ballarat plant's energy consumption would avoid network tariffs on that part of its usage. Gas use would drop by 16 per cent a year.Mr Hoogesteger said the ability of the biomass plant to run around the clock meant it could smooth the output of the solar plant, which only generates in the daytime. The biomass plant could be ramped down during the day, effectively saving power for the evening."It's almost like having a grid-scale battery, working together with solar," he said, adding that McCain's predictable operations and regular output of potato waste ensured the steady supply of waste that was critical to the success of biomass projects."Behind the meter" refers to systems installed on an energy user's side of its power meter, rather than on the grid side.Log in&nbsp;or&nbsp;&nbsp;to save articleChina's demand for Australian iron ore is expected to remain strong until mid-2021 despite rising political tensionThe deal for a small office tower in Palmerston Crescent is the latest in a run of transactions around the leafy St Kilda Road&nbsp;precinct.With large, partially undeveloped sites close to major urban centres, large-format retail properties are well suited for logistics conversion, says JLL.Chinese power generators are paying 60 per cent more for their coal under a buy local campaign that has left Australian miners out in the cold.Woodside has taken heavy impairments on all its LNG plants after cutting its assumptions for oil and gas prices but has highlighted its capacity to chase acquisitions and investments in the current torrid market.A study on a potential hydrogen plant at the oil and gas producer's site in South Australia's north is to be carried out by GHD by the end of the year.There is a 5 percentage point difference in emissions reduction for countries that had a carbon price and those that didn't.The impairments come after Oil Search reassessed the economic conditions and the outlook for oil and gas prices, but analysts are split on if more is to come.Italian utility Enel X is set to become a major player in smoothing out Australia's increasingly unstable grid by adding tens of megawatts to reserves.

Print articleJul 14, 2020 – 12.00amLog in&nbsp;or&nbsp;&nbsp;to save articlePotato chip producer McCain Foods has started installing 17,000 solar panels on the ground and on the roof of the carpark at its main Australian production plant in Ballarat as part of what is thought to be the country's largest "behind the meter" renewable energy system.The system will include a heat and power plant fuelled by biogas produced from potato skins and juice that will complement the solar generation by acting as a sort of battery, powering down during sunlit hours but able to crank into gear...

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Angela Macdonald-Smith

For 70 years, The Australian Financial Review has been the authority on business, finance and political news in Australia.

McCain chips in with renewables at Ballarat plant

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