Saturday 10/5/2008 Page: 7
A TASMANIAN poultry producer has reignited his family's links with wind power through an engineering project that involved dismantling a wind turbine in Denmark and shipping it to Sassafras. The Nichols family's windpower connection stretches back to wartime Britain. Robert Nichols' maternal grandfather, Fred Dickman, operated a grain windmill on his farm in Harby. UK. Because it was also in the flight path of RAF fighter planes, its blades were dismantled and replaced by a light to guide the aircraft.Yesterday, after four years of planning and bureaucratic wrangling, the managing director of Nichols Poultry watched as Minister for the Environment Michelle O'Byrne used a remote control to start the blades tuning on the Vestas 225kW turbine - the only privately owned wind-power generator on mainland Tasmania. Its output will meet 60 per cent of the poultry processor's energy needs. That is enough energy to supply 68 households with all the electricity they would need in a year. It will also save 400 tonnes of carbon dioxide from going into the atmosphere each year.
"This has been an obsession and it has involved more red tape than I thought was possible," Mr Nichols said yesterday. "But others believed in my crazy idea and it has come together." Nichols Poultry started 20 years ago as a cottage industry supplying fresh turkeys, it now supplies 25 per cent of fresh poultry sales each year in Tasmania. The State Government contributed $65,000 to the project through a CleanBiz grant scheme. The capital investment in the project should be recouped in three to five years through energy savings.
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