Photo by American Public Power Association on Unsplash
A proposal by an international consortium details a renewable energy hub to be built in Western Australia, potentially soon to be the world’s largest. Named the Western Green Energy Hub, or WGEB, the proposal includes spending $100 billion to develop a site of close to six thousand square miles that will generate over fifty Gigawatts of energy. Currently, the largest renewable energy park is a roughly 450 square mile hybrid energy park in India.
The consortium proposing the development consists of InterContinental Energy, CWP Global, and Mirning Green Energy Limited. The parcel of land, originally owned by Mirning, currently generates up to 54 GW powered by coal, gas, and renewable energy. The proposed hub will generate nearly the same capacity in the form of hydrogen and ammonia using solar and wind energy. The consortium has stated that it plans to work in three phases to produce up to three and a half million tons of zero-carbon green hydrogen or twenty million tons of green ammonia each year. While ammonia is an emergent solution desperately needed for heavy transport, hydrogen can be used to process minerals, an energy-intensive practice that relies on fossil fuel.
All of this produced hydrogen and ammonia will be used in power stations, heavy industries, and aviation. Additionally, an off-shore facility is to be constructed to transfer fuel onto ships beginning by 2030. Thirty GW are to be generated through wind, and the rest through solar energy. This proposal comes on the back of a similar, smaller proposal by two of the consortium’s three members, which was rejected as harmful to wetlands and a threat to bird species. However, there is optimism that this one will come to fruition, as solar and wind have already been shown to work in the area. If approved, this will be the largest green energy project in the world, eclipsing a 45 GW renewable energy project to be built in Kazakhstan.
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