The $180 million site with 310,000 solar panels can generate 120 megawatts or enough electricity to power 36,000 homes.

Spark Infrastructure purchased the Trahairs Road solar operation in 2019 while it was still under construction, and it was hooked up to the power grid in the first half of 2020.

Spark's half yearly report, released to the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX) this week, revealed its connection to the grid had failed in January.

"In January 2021 there was a fault to Bomen Solar Farm's 33 kilovolt switchgear at the onsite substation. The fault resulted in Bomen Solar Farm going offline for 20 days," the report to the ASX stated.

"Restoration of the fault is complete and the farm recommenced generation on 31 January 2021."

The solar site's contractor had to repair the fault at their own cost.

"Bomen Solar Farm generated 84 gigawatt hours of renewable energy during the period, experienced minimal downtime outside of the outage [in January] and had no other material curtailment or outages," the report stated.

Spark head of renewables Anthony Marriner said the project's power output was getting close to its designed level, which could power a city the size of Wagga.

"We did obviously have the outage in January, which was one of the highest production months in the middle of summer, and that did cost us a significant amount of generation," he said.

"Other than that, the farm has performed really well even though the weather hasn't been great at Bomen during that period, but we are pretty happy with the plant performance itself with the number of outages we had. Given that 84 gigawatt hours for the half year was lower than we expected it to be because of the outage, it could in a normal year generate power for a city the size of Wagga."

In other news

The report to the ASX stated that the Bomen Solar Farm had displaced "more than 68,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent in the first six months of 2021".

On those figures, the Bomen Solar Farm prevented the release of carbon emissions equivalent to that of 20,000 average Australian cars over the same time period.

Despite the outage, Spark reported to the share market that "Bomen Solar Farm performed well in the first half of 2021, generating total revenues of $6.3 million".

Some $5 million of that revenue came from long-term Power Purchase Agreements with Westpac bank and energy retailer Flow Power.

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