Construction began on Fortescue’s Turner River solar farm in the red dirt of Western Australia’s Pilbara in May. Expected to be completed by 2028, Turner River is the fourth and final solar energy plant in the mining company’s plan to switch to renewable energy for all its terrestrial iron ore operations.
Fortescue is not alone. Renewable power generation ticks a lot of boxes for many large facilities forced to progressively reduce their emissions by Australia’s safeguard mechanism. Professor Kylie Catchpole, co-director of the Australian National University’s Centre for Energy Systems, says she and her colleagues are currently working on a study looking at the safeguard mechanism companies and the potential for on-site solar farms.
Notwithstanding a significant upfront cost, in the long run solar can make a lot of economic sense for big industry in remote locations. “It can be very attractive for mining businesses, especially when the alternative might be using diesel fuel,” Catchpole says. “It can be significantly cheaper for them to have their own local generation.”
Blessed with a sunny climate, Australia can increasingly lean on solar power as coal-fired power stations come to the end of their lives and fossil fuels are progressively retired in the march to Net Zero.
In 2025, solar was Australia’s largest source of renewable power, generating 19.6 per cent of all renewable energy produced in the country. Some 12.2 per cent of this solar power was sourced from rooftops. Australia leads the world in household solar energy, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics: about 4.5 million Australian homes, one in three, have installed solar.
Some commercial organisations have leveraged solar power – the Port of Brisbane, for instance, has a solar energy virtual power network which covers the port itself and many lease-holders. Yet there are still many businesses with large empty roof space – “the missing middle of mid-scale solar”, Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen said in August. To remedy this shortage, he announced the expansion of a scheme to subsidise small-scale renewable energy installations – up to 1 megawatt in size – and designed to cut the cost of installing solar at schools, supermarkets, factories and farm buildings by 20 per cent.
“According to the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, while Australia’s residential solar is sitting at 22 gigawatts, businesses have only installed around 5.6 gigawatts,” Bowen said. ”Estimates vary, but the technical rooftop potential for solar on commercial, industrial and agricultural rooftops could exceed 80 GW.”
At the much larger grid level, at least 100 utility-scale solar power plants are now in operation across Australia, generating renewable energy for sale. Solar power production has now outrun demand in the middle of the day, leading to waste if facilities have inadequate battery storage. It’s now widely understood in the sector that there’s no point building a solar farm unless a large on-site battery system is part of the equation.
Catchpole says battery systems have become an important element of solar farms because they reduce the strain on transmission lines. As well as more renewable power generation, according to projections Australia will need to build about 6,000 kilometres of transmission lines in the years to come.
Regardless of the nation’s increasing spread of household solar generation, utility scale solar farms will always be a necessary part of the renewable energy mix, she adds. Solar farms have significant upfront costs, but then so do coal-fired power stations and, one way or another, Australia has to invest in power for an increasingly electrified future.
“Overall we’re going to use a lot more electricity in the future than we’re using now; as everything gets electrified, as heating gets electrified, as transport gets electrified,” she says. “So that means a lot more investment in electricity infrastructure than we have had previously. Household solar reduces the amount of transmission needed in the system, but either way, you still need a fair bit of utility-scale solar because it’s not just about providing energy for households; it’s also about providing energy for industry and everything else.”
The Australian