- Rio Tinto has announced the latest steps in its plan to deploy 1GW of renewable energy for its operations in Pilbara, Australia.
- The new resources will be online by 2026, while the mining company’s board has approved investment in another 100MW.
Rio Tinto has announced the latest steps in its plan to deploy 1GW of renewable energy for its operations in Pilbara, Australia. The company will invest AU$600 million (US$402 million) into large-scale solar PV and battery energy storage system (BESS) technology for its iron ore excavation in the mineral-rich Western Australian region. This project is scheduled to be online by 2026. The announced investment will fund the construction of two 100MW solar PV plants and 200MWh BESS. This will add to 34MW of solar PV installed at Rio Tinto’s recently opened Gudai-Darri iron ore mine.
The new resources will be online by 2026, while the mining company’s board has approved investment in another 100MW solar PV plant in the region which will come online a year earlier. Also, other companies are investing in green energy in Pilbara, a region with abundant solar and wind resources, coupled with the need to decarbonise mining operations. As well as being polluting, refuelling and maintaining fossil fuel generators at off-grid extraction sites has high costs and challenging logistics.
The company’s chief executive of its iron ore business, Simon Trott, said “Rio Tinto wants to halve its greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in Pilbara by 2030 and will invest about AU$3 billion in “installing renewable energy assets as well as transmission and storage upgrades” in the Pilbara”. The AU$3 billion Rio Tinto set out as an investment for a 1GW renewable energy system in the Pilbara is a significant portion of its total planned AU$7.5 billion spent on halfway decarbonisation by the end of this decade.