These are the 50th and 51st wind farms to have purchased AMSC’s D-VAR systems worldwide and AMSC’s 6th and 7th wins in Australia, AMSC says.
Both of the D-VAR solutions included in the contracts will be deployed to enable wind farms to meet local grid interconnection requirements.
AMSC will provide a D-VAR system to Suzlon Energy Australia, a subsidiary of India’s Suzlon Energy, for the 132 MW AGL Hallett 4 (North Brown Hill) Wind Farm being erected outside of Jamestown, South Australia.
AMSC will also provide a D-VAR system to Consolidated Power Projects Australia for Roaring 40s Renewable Energy’s 111 MW Waterloo Wind Farm currently under construction approximately 100 km north of Adelaide in South Australia. Both D-VAR systems will be delivered within the next 6 months.
AMSC’s D-VAR solutions can be used to provide voltage regulation, power factor correction and post-contingency assistance to help prevent voltage collapse on the power grid to which the wind farms are connected, AMSC says. These solutions enable wind farm developers to meet grid interconnection requirements adopted in countries such as Australia.
“In order to help facilitate the integration of electricity generated from renewable sources of energy, Australia is requiring that the reactive compensation of wind power plants be similar to that of traditional generation plants,” says Timothy Poor, Senior Vice President of Global Sales and Business Development at AMSC.
“As a result, we are seeing a growing pipeline of opportunities for our best-in-class D-VAR solution. With Australia recently setting a target to derive 20% of its electricity needs from renewable sources by 2020, we believe this will be a sizable market for AMSC for many years to come.”
AMSC’s D-VAR solutions will now be supporting more than 700 MW of wind power in Australia and the country currently has a total installed capacity of 1.9 GW of wind power according to market research firm Emerging Energy Research (EER). EER also estimates Australia’s total installed capacity will rise to 10 GW by 2020.