BROKEN Hill spawned the world’s largest mining company and generated more than US$75 billion in wealth. Now as its minerals ebb, Australia’s longest-lived mining city is looking to tap a more abundant resource.

    On the sun-baked edge of the Outback city, 700 miles west of Sydney, a solar farm the size of London’s Hyde Park shimmers like an oasis — its panels sending enough electricity to the national grid to power 17,000 homes a year. Combined with a sister plant, the AGL Energy Ltd. and First Solar Inc. project is the largest of its type in the southern hemisphere.

    Clean energy advocates are counting on the 140-hectare (346-acre) development to make Broken Hill, which at one time boasted the world’s most successful silver mine, a trailblazer once again. The birthplace of Broken Hill Proprietary Co., whose 2001 merger with Billiton Plc. formed the mining giant BHP Billiton Ltd., will help pave the way for more projects that profit from the sun’s power.

    “It’s giving birth to the large-scale solar industry in Australia,” said Adam Mackett, AGL’s project manager, as he strolled among the 678,000 solar panels under a cloudless blue sky. “Hopefully, from Broken Hill’s point of view, they’ll see this as the start of something bigger.”

    Australia gets more solar radiation per square meter than any other continent. Yet while the nation leads the world in installing rooftop solar panels, it trails 19 countries from Bulgaria to Ukraine in producing the power at solar farms.

    Solar accounted for about 2 percent of Australia’s electricity generation last year, according to the Clean Energy Council, an industry group in Melbourne. Fossil fuels, by contrast, made up almost 87 percent of the mix, reflecting the nation’s reliance on mining.

    “We’ve been so rich underground, we shouldn’t ignore what we have above ground,” said Esther La Rovere, a Broken Hill native and co-owner of the Palace Hotel, a 48-room inn featured in the 1994 movie “The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert.” “Broken Hill does need to reinvent itself and be part of new technologies and ways of doing things — and we’ve got plenty of sunshine.”

    Mining is so inextricably linked to Broken Hill that even the 126-year-old hotel was once connected to a nearby mine by an underground tunnel. An enormous pile of discarded rocky earth looms over the city, whose street names are inspired by the minerals and compounds that have helped sustain it, like Argent, Cobalt, Bromide, Sulphide and Oxide.

    Broken Hill is home to the world’s largest known lead, zinc, silver deposit. Its 8-kilometer ore body has been mined continuously since the 1880s and is now petering. Just two mining companies remain — Japan’s Toho Zinc Co. and China’s Shenzhen Zhongjin Lingnan Nonfemet Co. — and the city’s population has almost halved from about 35,000 in 1915.

    While the city has drawn tourists for decades, other new enterprises are needed to spur the local economy, and the potential for another solar project is being explored, said Mayor Wincen Cuy. (SD-Agencies)