Australia has flicked the switch on its first utility-scale solar farm, which will provide electricity to power a nearby desalination plant in the south west of the country.

The 10MW Greenough River Solar Farm takes the title of the largest solar facility in the country, consisting of 150,000 thin film photovoltaic modules across a 50-acre site. The site is owned jointly by General Electric Energy Financial Services and state-run Verve Energy.

The $50m project hopes to avoid 20,000 tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions a year and will provide energy to the Southern Seawater Desalination Plant, which provides drinking water in Perth and the rest of south-west Australia.

“As the largest photovoltaic solar plant in operation in Australia, the Greenough River Solar Farm demonstrates that renewable technologies can contribute to meeting Australia’s future energy needs on a sustainable, cost-competitive basis,” said Verve Energy chief executive Jason Waters.

He added that there were plans in the pipeline to quadruple the size of Greenough to 40MW.

In related news, solar companies in Australia are hoping to complete their millionth installation by next summer, after new figures showed deployment rates are running ahead of those previously forecast in July.

According to the Australian Clean Energy Regulator (ACER), there is now just under 2GW of solar capacity installed on domestic roofs. More than 858,000 homes in Australia are equipped with solar photovoltaic panels and more than 600,000 have solar thermal panels.

The recent growth in demand suggests the industry has survived cuts to the feed-in tariff last year, which led to a subsequent drop in demand.

The Sustainable Energy Association of Australia (SEA) said the figures showed that one million homes could have installed solar technology by the end of June 2013, if installation rates continue at the current level.

New figures suggest one million homes will have solar generating capacity in Australia by next summer