About a third of Richard Munsie's 1000 hectare farm near the NSW New England town of Uralla has been leased for what will be the largest solar farm in Australia.
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For the past nine months that he's had operational solar panels on his land, he says he's reaped four times the return he'd have made using that same land to just graze sheep.
Mr Munsie is the sixth generation of his family on the land at Uralla, and he is one of a large group of neighbours who are part of the combined aggregation of close to 2000ha which they have dedicated to hosting the panels.
"We can still graze our sheep under the panels, which will save the company the cost of mowing around them," Mr Munsie said.
"And that will work with me, I can move my ewes around and that will give my other paddocks a spell from grazing."
Mr Munsie said the panels create a microclimate, where they shade the early morning pastures thus prolonging the effects of the dew, but also providing shade throughout the day for stock.
"In our harsh winters, the panels also protect the pastures from the frosts we get here," he said.
"And we might even be able to run more sheep due to the climate created by the panels, but we'll see."
The contracts are for 30 years, with a 10-plus-10 option, and Mr Munsie said the requirement to clean up the panels at the termination of the lease was built into the contract.
"The company has to leave the land in as satisfactory condition as is possible," he said.
Daniel Moroko, who is the founder and chief executive of Rok Solid, a renewable energy land acquisition agency that works between landholders and big business to secure renewable energy storage projects, says without more people like Mr Munsie who were willing to explore the options, Australia would fail to reach its targets for a fully decarbonised energy transition by 2050.
"Many farmers are sitting on that land and are making in the vicinity of a million dollars a year leasing out 800ha to 1000ha, while others are leasing a smaller portion, even just 20ha and still earning six figures," Mr Moroko says.
Mr Moroko insists more must be done to cut red tape, citing the years it's taken for the solar project in the New England region to get off the ground.
While Mr Moroko did not disclose what Mr Munsie was making from the leases on his farm at Uralla, he did claim that some farmers were earning upwards of $100,000 a year in passive income, with huge demand for land for renewable energy projects as companies strive to be net zero.
Mr Moroko said Rok Solid had so far secured four gigawatts of storage projects and 800 megawatts of solar projects across 30 individual land deals brokered across NSW, Queensland, Victoria and South Australia.
"There's a huge race for battery energy storage sites across the country at the moment to help states reduce demand on the grid and prevent blackouts," said Rok Solid founder and chief executive Daniel Moroko.
"In the past few years we've secured land which will deliver more than 4000MW of battery energy storage systems back into the grid; including major BESS projects on Victoria's Mornington Peninsula and South Australia's Gould Creek, which are now DA approved and ready to build."
He said Rok Solid had also secured some 800MW of solar farm projects by amalgamating a number of landholders and introducing major companies like Atlas Renewables, Valent Energy, RWE and Ratch to bring these large scale projects to fruition.
