ASIA-PACIFIC BROADCASTING

Critical communications specialist Broadcast Australia has commissioned its first broadcast transmission site to be mostly powered by renewable energy. The Mount Owen site near Queens-town in Tasmania has been recently upgraded to use site-generated wind and solar power, which together are expected to reliably meet the site’s 8kW power needs for 80%-90% of the time.

The Mount Owen site broadcasts a range of national and commercial analogue/digital radio and TV services to the Queenstown and Zeehan area, plus supports critical radio communications for local emergency services. According to Gary Café, Broadcast Australia’s energy systems engineer, the power demands of new services, such as digital TV, were starting to exceed the capacity of the existing mains feed.

“As this is a remote facility, providing on-site renewable energy generation was a commercially viable option to enable the broadcast of digital TV to the local area, compared with the cost of upgrading the mains feed,” Café said. “At 980m above sea level, Mount Owen benefits from a strong prevailing south-westerly wind, making it ideal for wind turbine power generation.”

A constant-output horizontal-axis wind turbine has been erected on a 15m-high mast. The turbine is rated for maximum power generation of 15kW for a wind speed of 12m/s (43km/h). The wind turbine is supplemented by 36sqm of mono-crystalline solar photovoltaic panels, rated at 5kW peak generating capacity.

The site is designed to operate primarily from wind and solar power. Excess generated electricity charges two banks of batteries — each rated at 2900Ah — which supplement the power supply when the combination of wind- and solar-generated power drops below the site demand of 8kW. The batteries alone can provide power autonomy for two days.

During periods of limited on-site wind- or solar-generation, the balance of the site load can additionally be met from mains power, or from an onsite 31kVA diesel generator. This is set up to start automatically, but can be activated remotely from the Network Operations Centre. Equipped with a 1,000-litre fuel reserve, the generator can provide total site power for 10 days.

Engineering a system to provide a reliable power supply from such variable sources has been demanding for Broadcast Australia. “Our requirement for a reliable mid-sized wind generator was something of a niche application, for which there isn’t a great deal of expertise in the marketplace,” said Café. “However, we have overcome the many challenges to achieve an outcome that allows these new technologies to be evaluated with very little risk to the on-site services.”

With the infrastructure successfully installed, the Mount Owen transmission site is now able to reliably provide most of its power demands from renewable sources. “This will potentially save up to 60MWh of conventional power each year from this site alone,” said Café. “The experience gained here will have far-reaching implications for Broadcast Australia’s carbon footprint for the future, as renewable power options are considered for a multitude of additional sites.”

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