Research Partnership with UWA

As part of the initiative, UWA purchased a farm 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. 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.

•  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 house’s energy is totally supplied by the solar PV system – no additional generators are used.
• The system has a 3 day redundancy meaning that the house can run for 3 days if there was no sun or a system malfunction.
• The system features 2 x 5kw ground mounted solar arrays (total 10kw) together with a battery backup system.
• The system production and homestead power usage is monitored remotely via the web using the GreenSense View platform.

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