Australian Gold Miner Goes For Innovative Solar Plant To Cut Emissions

Australian Gold Miner, Bellevue mining is on course to power operations with 100% renewables at times, as  it seeks an 89.7 MW off grid facility at its mining site in Western Australia. Domestic Adelaide based solar firm 5B has been tasked with deploying 26MW of its 5B ‘Maverick’ solar farm at Bellevue Gold’s high-grade gold mine. The 89.7 MW power facility will be owned and operated by Zenith Energy, which has previously worked with 5B and its Maverick solar plant as well.

528 5B Maverick arrays will be deployed for the off-grid facility that will use a combination of wind, solar, thermal generation, and battery storage to ensure over 80% of the power used at the facility comes from renewables.

That will possibly make Bellevue Gold the most renewably powered off-grid gold mine in Australia.

What is the 5B Maverick?

The 5B Maverick is a fully prefabricated solar array solution. The ground mount, modular solar solution is designed to be safer, require less labour hours to install, and to be more energy dense than conventional tracker and fixed tilt array solutions. The 5B Maverick can be used in a wide range of commercial, industrial and large-scale solar applications. Each 5B Maverick consists of up to 90 solar modules, typically mounted on 9 hinged racks between 10 composite steel-concrete beams. The design is meant to require less ground penetrating foundations, and be resistant to high winds. The firm also claims that it is much more efficient than single axis tracker plants.

Being easily relocated to meet the changing demands of customer is counted as a key benefit as well.

Bellevue Gold, which has an aspirational goal of net zero (Scope 1 and Scope 2) emissions for the Bellevue Gold Project by 2026, sees the solar farm as a key step in lowering its emissions, said  Bellevue Gold CEO and managing director Darren Stralow .