Work has begun on a giant new solar farm. 

TagEnergy, a renewable energy developer and part of the Impala SAS Group, has announced construction of Australia’s largest onshore wind farm is underway. 

The 1300MW Golden Plains wind farm in Victoria is being built on a fully merchant basis, meaning that TagEnergy will trade in the wholesale market rather than underpinning its revenues with long-term power purchase contracts with customers. 

The project, worth $2 billion, will be TagEnergy’s first in Australia, and is expected to generate enough electricity to meet 9 per cent of Victoria’s power demand. 

The Clean Energy Finance Corporation (CEFC) has invested $175 million into the project, the largest investment by the government-owned organisation in a wind project, and it is also expected to yield the biggest single contribution to emissions reductions in its portfolio.

Once operational in 2025, the wind farm will provide enough power to fuel around 450,000 homes annually, making a significant contribution to Australia’s goal of having renewable energy account for more than 80 per cent of the country’s electricity generation mix by the end of the decade. 

The project will also help compensate for the retirement of fossil fuel generators, a concern among industry observers who fear that new projects are not being built quickly enough. 

The CEFC funding for Golden Plains will sit alongside $1.8 billion of private sector capital, including equity from TagEnergy and debt from Westpac, Commonwealth Bank, Bank of China, Mizuho, Germany’s state-owned KfW and Danish credit export agency EKF. 

TagEnergy’s global CEO and founder Franck Woitiez said that the company is looking at additional projects across the east coast of Australia. 

“We’re looking at projects in Queensland and New South Wales, for instance, where we think we have a role to play in the transition by adding more sustainable and competitive renewables,” Mr Woitiez told The Australian Financial Review. 

The Golden Plains wind farm will create 700 jobs and has been divided into two stages. TagEnergy said it was nearing all necessary approvals for the second stage, worth 576MW. 

The project includes 122 wind turbines each with a capacity of 6.2 megawatts, which will generate 756.4MW of renewable energy, intended to replace coal-fired generation. Vestas will supply the turbines and build the wind farm.