Australia's largest chicken farm adds major solar storage system

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We’re always on the lookout for the more weird and wonderful locations that are being made use of as solar projects, so we were definitely interested to hear that Australia’s largest free-range chicken farm launched a big solar and storage system earlier this month. The chicken-adjacent project offers 1.4 MW of rooftop solar and 2.28 MWh of energy storage, utilising five lithium-ion batteries.

The project in question is the Riverlands Free Range poultry farm in South Australia, which happens to be the nation’s largest free-range chicken farm. AAM – the investment group which owns the farm – have made the move to add 1.4 MW of solar panels and a 2.28 MWh Tesla lithium-ion battery system alongside an announcement that it is the largest energy storage system installed on a commercial farm in Australia.

AAM’s managing director, Garry Edwards and his colleague Ben Edser revealed that the entire solar sustainability project cost in the region of 5 million Australian dollars, which is roughly £2.75m. 

Ben Edser then went on to explain a little about the project, saying “Before we put the system in, our cost of energy imported from the network was getting toward $1 million. AAM has also developed its own energy management system. Whilst we might be an energy generator at one site, we might be an energy consumer at another. So, it’s really how we blend and manage that load and use power within the complex, but also taking into account what’s the voltage and what are the network prices doing.”

While it may seem humorous on the surface to combine a chicken farm with a solar storage facility, it’s actually a really smart and efficient use of space and one we hope to see many more of in the future.

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