Goonellabah, Lismore: 90 kW commercial solar and 50 kWh of storage

The brief

A daytime-heavy commercial site with a big roof and a big bill, and an owner who wanted to stop paying peak rates in the early evening as well. The roof had the area for a 90 kW array; the question was how much storage made sense and how to get it through Essential Energy's embedded generation process at that scale.

What we installed

• 90 kW Winaico commercial array on SunLock commercial racking, laid out for the roof structure and the site's wind loading.
• Sungrow three-phase inverter platform, with Essential Energy embedded generation approval, export limiting and protection settings handled by Thomson Energy.
• 50 kWh battery storage, charging on excess solar through the middle of the day and discharging into the site's evening load.
• Switchboard, isolation and distribution works to tie the system into the existing main switchboard cleanly, with full compliance documentation.

The outcome

Daytime grid draw cut to near zero on a typical operating day, with the battery carrying the site through the first hours of the evening peak. Commercial solar in the Northern Rivers still has the best payback of anything we install, usually three to five years on a daytime-heavy site, and adding storage made sense here because of the evening load and the exposure to outages on Lismore's network.

Why it matters for Lismore

Goonellabah is about 55 minutes from our workshop at Fernvale, and this is the closest large reference system for businesses around Lismore, Alstonville and Ballina considering solar and storage. It's the same specification, Winaico modules, Sungrow or Fronius three-phase inverters, SunLock or Clenergy racking and documentation that passes a tender audit, that we used on the 90 kW TVAC system in Murwillumbah. See also the Lismore and Nimbin service area.