Wind is best in west

Australasian Science
July, 2008 Page: 14

Australia's most promising offshore wind sites lie off the coast of Western Australia, a new study has found. Prof Dong-Sheng Jeng of the University of Dublin and Sydney University postgraduate student Yun Zheng evaluated Australian offshore sites on the basis of wind speed, water depth, environmental impact and development costs.

So far Australia has put all its windmills on land, but many European countries are shifting them out to sea as a shortage of remote onshore sites and the greater reliability of offshore winds overcome the high building costs of sea-based windmills.

But Zheng says she does not anticipate that offshore wind farms will be built in Australia in the near future. "What makes Australia different to Europe is that there is so much space on land to build wind farms there's no need to go offshore at this stage," she says. Nevertheless, development overseas may eventually bring costs down.