Adelaide Airport solar system becomes South Australia's biggest in 2016 and Australia's largest over carpark
The array of 4,500 solar panels installed over the Adelaide Airport short-term carpark.
Adelaide Airport’s 1.7MW rooftop solar install in 2016 took over as South Australia’s biggest and Australia’s largest solar carpark.
The 4,500 Trinasmart solar panels on the roof of airport’s short-term carpark brought the airport’s total solar capacity to 1.28MW – adding to panels placed on the domestic and international terminals in 2007. It was expected to offset 100% of the carpark’s electricity consumption, with excess power to supply just under 10% of the airport main terminals’ power needs.
Besides the 210,000 South Australian households at that time with rooftop solar PV, with total capacity of 720MW, other major industrial-scale solar panel phalanxes were being added to Adelaide roofs.
The South Australian Produce Market at Pooraka teamed 1600 solar panels and a large lithium ion battery to save stallholders over half a million dollars a year off their power bills. Elizabeth City, Castle Plaza and Kurralta Park shopping centres became part of Australia's largest shopping centre solar installation worth $28 million by Vicinity Centres.
Under the state Labor government renewable technology fund, Adelaide University received $780,000 to install 1.2MW of solar and a 0.5MW/2MWh vanadium flow redox battery system at its Roseworthy campus.
A $3 million state government grant went to renewable energy company Carnegie to install three megawatts of solar panels and two megawatts of battery storage in Elizabeth at the former Holden car plant, due to be transformed into Lionsgate Business Park. Carnegie would retail the energy to the park’s tenants. The solar system would cover about a fifth of the Holden factory's roof space, and would be one of the largest behind-the-meter microgrids in Australia.
About 7300 South Australian businesses had solar PV systems in 2018, with combined capacity of 102MW – roughly equivalent to the capacity of the Tesla battery at Jamestown.
