Wind & Solar Scaled Up To 15 GW For Asian RE Hub

• The project developers of Asian Renewable Energy Hub in Western Australia have revised upwards the capacity for wind and solar power project
• This increases the share of these technologies from the original 9 GW which was revised to 11 GW till recently, and now has been increased further to up to 15 GW
• The hub is planned to have up to 12 GW of generation for renewable hydrogen production
• The consortium expects financial close to be achieved by 2023

Being developed by a consortium of global energy players, the Asian Renewable Energy Hub (AREH) solar/wind project to come up in Pilbara region of Western Australia has been scaled up again – now to 15 GW. This is the second time capacity of these 2 renewable energy sources has been revised upwards for the project.

Originally, the project was planned to have 9 GW of wind and solar power capacity and was later revised to 11 GW, divided between 7.5 GW of wind turbines and 3.5 GW of solar PV (see Macquarie Joins $22bn Australian 11 GW RE Project). Now it has been further increased to 15 GW as announced on its Twitter account.

Along with wind and solar, the hub is planned to have up to 12 GW of generation for renewable hydrogen production and is supposed to generate 50 TWh of total annual generation with 3 GW of power generation reserved for the energy users within Pilbara.

While AREH itself did not disclose too many details about the increase, Australian clean energy news portal RenewEconomy referred to CWP Renewables Development Manager Andrew Dickson to share the upgrade in scale follows further studies into the resource and how the site can be optimized. The Energy Change Institute (ECI) of the Australian National University (ANU) is the research partner for the project.

The consortium expects financial close to be achieved by 2023 which would pave the way for the project to be delivered in phases over a 10-year period, depending on securing off-takes for either green electricity and/or green hydrogen.

In May 2019, state's Environmental Protection Authority invited for a public review of the project (see Public Review Sought For 11 GW RE Hub).