Blog Posts

Monday, March 12, 2012

Infinite Energy & UWA's Future Farm 2050 Project

Infinite Energy has completed work on the solar component of the University of Western Australia's Future Farm Australia 2050 Project.

The Project's vision is “to imagine the best-practice farm for 2050, and do it now.”  Details of the project are available on the UWA website at http://www.animals.uwa.edu.au/research/future-farm

As part of the initiative, UWA has purchased a farm site at Pingelly 150km south east of Perth. The solar component involves providing the new state of the art Farm Manager's residence with a stand alone Solar PV system which will supply 100% of the home's electricity needs. 

The Solar Project was delivered as a partnership between Infinite Energy, UWA's School of Electrical, Electronic & Computer Engineering, German Solar PV manufacturer Q-Cells and GreenSense. 

As well as providing a 100% off-grid solar power solution to the farm manager's residence, the solar array will also form the basis of an on-going research project which will evaluate different Solar PV technologies in a real world environment. 

About the Solar System

  •  The “off-grid” system is totally independent from the electricity grid (which is approximately 1km away) and will provide 100% of the energy requirements for the large modern farmhouse constructed at the site.
  • The system’s energy is totally supplied by the solar pv system – no additional generators are used.
  • The system has a 3 day redundancy meaning that electricity can be provided for 3 days if in theory the solar system did not produce any energy.
  • The system features 2 x 5kw solar arrays (total 10kw) mounted on the ground together with a battery backup system.
  • The system will be able to be remotely monitored via the internet in terms of energy produced and energy consumed via the GreenSense View platform.
·         Components used:

o  1 x 5kw Solar PV system utilising 22 x 235W Q-Cells Q-Pro G2 (Poly-crystaline) modules with an SMA SunnyBoy 5000TL inverter.
o    1 x 5kw Solar PV system utilising 56 x 90W Q-Cells Q-Smart modules (Thin-Film) with an SMA SMC 5000A inverter.
o   3 x SMA Sunny Island 5048
o   Clenergy Solar Terrace 3 Mounting System
o   24 x Hoppecke 8 OpzV Solar.Power 1000 batteries
o   Greensense View Monitoring Platform.