Wind farm powers on ahead of schedule

Canberra Times
Tuesday 14/7/2009 Page: 2

The windfarm at Bungendore has started generating electricity at least three weeks ahead of schedule. Turbines at the Capital Wind Farm began producing energy this month with 16 of the farm's 67 turbines now commissioned. Spokesman David Griffin said the windfarm was expected to be fully operational from September.

"It's going to be a relatively slow process, we hoped on average that we would commission two or three turbines a day, so we're slowly building tip," he said. "There's a fairly long commissioning process they've got to go through. Each turbine has to go through a series of individual tests to make sure it's operating correctly and the like."

The project drew objections from residents in Bungendore and the surrounding area when it was first mooted, but has support from local business and Palerang Shire mayor Ian Marjason.

The windfarm's white turbines have a blade sweep of up to 124m above the ground and can be seen from the Federal Highway across the Lake George plain. Each turbine can produce up to 2.1 MWs of electricity and the entire farm's capacity stands at 147 MWs. The $370 million windfarm will supply electricity to Sydney Water to power a desalination plant.

Mr Griffin said surplus electricity would be sold to the national energy market. He said while there were some noise complaints from neighbouring residents during early construction, there had been no complaints recently. The windfarm cannot create noise louder than 35 decibels at a neighbouring house, which Mr Griffin described as imperceptible. If background noise is higher than 35 decibels then the windfarm cannot be more than 5 decibels louder than the background.

"We are very conservative in planning the windfarm so it doesn't have a noise impact because the implications of that, if we fail to do that, it's a very difficult task to rectify that, and expensive. So we want to get it right the first tune," he said.