The Spanish group will invest more than €300 million (US$342 million)) in the facility, which will be built on a 555-hectare site currently used for agricultural purposes, primarily stock grazing.

The project is backed by a 10-year power purchase agreement that secures the long-term sale of electricity from the plant.

Construction has officially started, and commercial operations are targeted for 2028. The facility will connect to the National Electricity Market (NEM) via a 275kV transmission line linking to Powerlink’s nearby Teebar Substation.

The project received federal environment clearance under the EPBC Act in late 2025, when the Australian government determined it was not a controlled action under the legislation, clearing a key approvals hurdle.

The solar capacity at the time of that assessment was listed as 290MW, which was revised to 330MW as the project advanced toward construction.

The Fraser Coast facility is GPG’s second hybrid solar-plus-storage project in Australia.

The Cunderdin hybrid project in Western Australia, which GPG inaugurated in 2025, combined a 128MW solar plant with a 55MW/220MWh battery storage system supplied by Sungrow, becoming the first large-scale grid-connected hybrid solar and battery project in the state.

Construction start arrives weeks after GPG commissioned two new solar plants in Australia totalling 360MW, the 260MW Glenellen project in southern New South Wales and the 96MW Bundaberg plant in Queensland, which marked Naturgy’s first solar installation in that state.

Those two commissioning announcements brought GPG’s total installed capacity in Australia to 1.3GW across ten operating assets, including six wind farms, a battery storage system in the Australian Capital Territory, and the Cunderdin hybrid project.

An AU$2.3 billion (US$1.61 billion) portfolio financing completed by GPG Australia in December 2024 provided a funding platform for the company’s ongoing development activity.

That transaction, covering eight operating assets at the time, established GPG’s relationship with a consortium of infrastructure lenders and set a precedent for the type of portfolio-level financing that supports development pipelines of the scale now being delivered at Fraser Coast.

Naturgy operates in Australia through GPG, in which it holds a 75% majority stake, with Kuwait Investment Authority holding the remaining 25%.