We are opening one of the most exciting projects
I have been involved in in my eight years
as Vice-Chancellor.
We are opening a 64 megawatt solar farm at
Warwick.
A solar farm that will produce 160GWh each year.
It's so big that if you took all the rows
end to end and added them up in a line, it
would be almost 300 kilometres worth of solar
panels.
This is fantastic.
This is integrated thinking.
It's UQ knowledge leadership for a better
world.
UQ and solar panels go back a long way.
We had our first installation in 2011 with
the multistory carpark that was 1.22 megawatts.
And that was the largest rooftop solar installation
in Australia for many years running.
At that same time we also installed solar
panels at our Heron Island research station.
So, you know, 2011 was a long time ago.
And Gatton Solar Farm was built in 2015, so
that was 3.3 megawatts and now you have Warwick
Solar Farm - 64 megawatts, built in 2020.
In total at the Warwick Solar Farm, it's 150
hectares in size and across that area, we've
got just over 200 thousand panels that are
spread out into 2500 tracker rows.
One of the things that we researched at the
Gatton Solar Farm when it was constructed
was what the costs and benefits of the different
solar tracking technologies are.
From that research and from those learnings,
we decided that single-axis tracking technology
was the best option for Warwick.
It represented the best compromise between
the costs of the infrastructure to build upfront
and the additional energy yield that we get
by being able to track the sun as it rises
in the morning in the east and sets again
in the west.
They're really, really high tech smart little
pieces of technology, so they know if there's
a storm coming they stow into the wind.
At the end of the day, they actually store
flat because that's when you get the most
outputs.
They track each other and they try and prevent
shading on each other.
One of the significant things about the Warwick
Solar Farm is that UQ is going to become an
active participant in the energy market.
Rather than just getting a bill every month
and paying that bill, we're also going to
be a large energy generator.
What that means is that the Warwick Solar
Farm will sell that energy into the grid and
UQ sites will buy it back at the same price.
Effectively offsetting that energy usage during
the day.
And then the excess revenue we earn from selling
surplus solar during the middle of the day
will help offset the cost of energy that we
have to buy in the evenings.
We're also looking at energy storage technologies
like batteries and other types of emerging
technologies like hydrogen to see how we can
capture that surplus solar energy and then use
it at our sites after the sun sets.
The potential for research out at Warwick is
huge.
It's basically limitless because we own and
operate the asset.
If our researchers want to park a cloud cam
to forecast when clouds are coming over and
what that does to our output - they can do
that.
If they want access to the data, it's not
commercial-in-confidence, it's our data that
we're going to share freely.Anything that
a researcher can dream up, we can probably
work it out somehow.
The fact that we're integrating 64 megawatts
of solar panels into the grid is quite significant.
There's a lot of challenges when we're doing
that so the fact that we've got it there,
it creates a huge living laboratory for us
here at UQ.
Not only for students and staff, but also
our international collaborators.
The solar farm is a 30-year asset.
It's going to be operating, sending electricity
to the grid for 30 years.
The visitor centre will be there for 30 years
and it'll be positively impacting Warwick
while at the same time having a positive impact
for UQ because again, every single dollar
that the Warwick Solar Farm saves us, is a
dollar that can go to teaching and research.
