SOLAR AND STORAGE ENERGY PARTNER CONTENT
THE FIRST STEP BEFORE YOU BUILD
SOLAR OR WIND Australia’s love of renewable energy is showing no signs of slowing, with the nationwide adoption of renewable energy growing on average 44 per cent annually over the last ten years. One of the most critical aspects to ensuring a renewable development is financially viable is the monitoring that needs to be undertaken on-site before construction commences. Here we take a look at fundamentals of ensuring a monitoring campaign that produces high-quality data.
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s Australia continues to invest in renewables, emerging as a global leader in the field, there is a growing desire amongst the industry to understand the crucial elements that are essential for bringing a successful renewable development project to life. But before a single panel or turbine can be constructed, there is one foundational aspect that is essential to the success of any solar or wind development – a successful monitoring campaign. Although some differentiation exists between the processes of solar and wind monitoring, one key principle rings true across the board: attaining the highest quality data from your initial resource monitoring campaign is crucial. “Being able to deliver a gold-standard monitoring campaign is undeniably one of the most important aspects of a successful renewable development,” said renewables specialist, Dr Matthew Bechly. “Without high quality campaigns, you can’t ensure the bankability of your project.” Data collected from these monitoring campaigns is used to measure expected energy output, and is carried across all financial modelling to predict future income with a high level of certainty. This data is
Rugged monitoring equipment is essential to gathering high-quality data.
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March 2021 ISSUE 13
Weather monitoring is essential to the success of a renewable energy project.
incredibly important, as it supports and validates a project's investment prospects as well as giving a lens into the long-term profitability of a potential site. So what makes for a great monitoring campaign, and how can we ensure that a resource campaign runs successfully? There are two core elements that contribute to a successful monitoring campaign. First, high-quality instruments and equipment to ensure accurate data collection; and second, comprehensive data collection across varying locations on the proposed site. Australian Radio Towers, an engineering, fabrication and construction company, is one company that has continued to see the benefits of investing in high-quality monitoring campaigns and the equipment necessary to make that happen. Having worked in the industry since 2008 and having supplied monitoring equipment since 2011, the Australian Radio Towers team has continued to see monitoring investments pay off.
“Having been involved in weather monitoring systems and their long-term implications for some time now, there is no denying the benefits of working with the highest quality equipment when striving to deliver a successful monitoring campaign,” said Dr Bechly. “We’ve even seen some of our monitoring stations weather a cyclone, intact. If that site had been using a cheaper, less durable set of equipment that wasn’t able to withstand the severe weather event, the whole campaign would have been compromised, making it very hard for developers to seek investment to move the project forward.” Having installed monitoring stations across all states of Australia, Australian Radio Towers has supplied equipment to withstand the rugged Australian terrain, and have consistently been a testament to the notion that investing in high-quality campaigns will always be money well spent.
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