Wilderness sanctuary ditches diesel for batteries

After decades of power outages and uncertain, expensive and polluting diesel to supply its energy needs, the remote off-grid Arkaroola Wilderness Sanctuary in South Australia’s Flinders Ranges has ditched diesel and switched to a battery-based microgrid.

The Sanctuary has teamed with off-grid power specialist Apex Energy Australia and commissioned the Arkaroola Microgrid, which includes 100kW of rooftop solar and120kWh of lithium battery storage.

The micro-grid will provide electric vehicle charging, air conditioning and hot water heating, and is equipped with smart monitoring and control capabilities to manage loads, and kicks off Arkaroola’s journey to renewable powered self-reliance.

It serves as an important educational experience in remote energy technology and engineering – and on a limited budget.

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A great outdoor museum

A candidate for World Heritage status and once described as a “great outdoor museum” for its significant fossil deposits and geological formations, the Arkaroola Wilderness Sanctuary is located 600km north of Adelaide.

An eight hour drive from Adelaide, it’s a popular ecotourism destination and hub for scientific and environmental research, and one of Australia’s most isolated self-supporting villages with its own power generation and water collection systems.

Since the mid 1960s it’s operated on diesel power, but efforts began several years ago to shift Arkaroola to clean energy, driven at first by the facility’s owners and community-based renewable energy funding venture Corena.

In 2021, a federal government grant for $1.3 million enabled a team of specialists led by Apex Energy to research, design, engineer and evaluate the best options to address the energy supply challenges of the Sanctuary.

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In mid 2023 the team is putting to the test a mix of technologies and solutions it has chosen for the renewable microgrid. Apex Energy project manager Sean LePoidevin says it’s already showing signs it can slash Arkaroola’s diesel use by up to 50%.

LePoidevin says the team had to balance minimising upfront costs with the cost of ongoing maintenance and replacement, which can also become expensive.

They also needed technologies that factored in temperature extremes and the energy consumption patterns that come with influxes of tourists and other visitors to the site.

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It’s about conservation

For the owners of the Sanctuary, the Sprigg family, the shift to renewable energy is about more than sourcing a cheaper and reliable power supply.

The addition of the solar and battery microgrid starts to resolve the ethical dilemma of powering an award-winning nature conservancy with polluting and climate wrecking fossil fuels.

“Being so remote, we have to generate our own electricity and we’ve been doing that based on diesel fuel,” says Doug Sprigg, son of founder Reg Sprigg.

“Arkaroola has been a labour of love,” adds Sprigg. “It’s taken a lot of perseverance tocope with power outages, uncertain and expensive diesel supply as well as powering our water system.

“Themicrogrid resolves a decades-long challenge and we’re excited for the future.

“Wesee Arkaroola as a public resource and ourselves as its caretakers. It’s our job to protect it and share its wonders with the world.”

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A solar mounting solution worth its (light) weight

Apex also had to be clever about how to install the 100kW of solar panels at Arkaroola.

The Sanctuary’s Mawson Lodge with its corrugated iron roof and ageing building substructure was earmarked to host a big chunk of the microgrid’s solar.

With20 accommodation rooms, ensuite bathrooms, kitchenettes, and reverse cycle air-conditioning, the total power consumption of the Lodge can be considerable both during the winter peak season when temperatures drop to near freezing, and in summer when they reach up to 40°C.

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So the Apex team chose to install the panels using a light-weight rail-less solar mounting system from metal roof solar specialist S-5!, a choice that ApexEnergy project manager Sean Le Poidevin says cut the project’s installation costs by 25 per cent.

It also allowed them to use a landscape-oriented system and maximise the roof space sufficiently to expand the Mawson Lodge array by 7.3% to 61.6kWp of generation capacity.

“Rails are unnecessary on a metal roof,” says Le Poidevin.

“Once you understand how to approach cable management, it really is a more common-sense solution with a multitude of benefits, from protecting the roof to cost savings and simplified logistics and installation.

“It makes sense from all angles,” he says.

Installing the system without rails meant lower freight costs – a systems savings of 750kg– and the ability to maximise the available rooftop space for solar, which resulted in “an easier installation, and… [a] better-looking, low-profile rooftop system that blends with the stunning natural landscape.”

‍Room to grow

The initial budget for the off-grid system was not high enough to meet all of Arkaroola’s energy needs in the first instance.

“The system had to be designed so that capacity could be added easily without requiring major system rework,” Le Poidevin says.

To this end, the 100kW solar array on the Mawson Lodge and workshop rooftops was designed to be expandable to 400kW; the battery system to 363kWh; and a 60 kW continuous 3-phase battery inverter/charger is expandable to 180kW.

The microgrid also integrates with the existing diesel generator system, and includes underground cabling to major solar locations, and a 22kW 3-phase public electric vehicle charging station. 

A review of the microgrid system and the trialled technologies will take place over12 months to evaluate the benefits, successes and learnings of the project.

“It is early days in the transition of Arkaroola to renewable energy, and the phase one solar and battery system has laid the groundwork for more renewable penetration in the years to come.

“Arkaroola is a demonstration of what’s possible for other outback communities looking to set themselves up with clean, sustainable energy for the future,” Le Poidevin says.

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A previous version of this article first appeared on One Step off the Grid. You can read it here.