Australia’s age-old mining city, Broken Hill – which, in 1885, gave the world’s biggest mining company, BHP Billiton, the first two letters of its name – is tapping the energy of the sun and no longer mining the now-ebbed silver/lead/zinc deposit that originally attracted miners to the New South Wales rural area. Broken Hill Solar Plant site manager Andrew Reimann is seen walking between rows of solar panels at the First Solar-constructed and AGL-operated 53 MW photovoltaic Broken Hill solar plant, which has 650 000 solar modules on 140 ha of land. A 22 kV transmission line connects the plant to the national electricity grid. New from Broken Hill is nyholmite, a transparent-to-translucent mineral found in the weathering zones of the area’s cadmium/zinc arsenate deposits.