Fans of clean, green power - Electricity for 15.000 homes

Sun Herald
Sunday 30/8/2009 Page: 29

THE state's capacity to produce power from the air has leapt with the commissioning of its biggest - and smallest - wind farms. The power generator Origin Energy has spent $95 million building 15 wind turbines, each 80 metres tall, to produce 30 MWs of electricity on the Cullerin Range, 30 kilometres west of Goulburn. Erected on four farms, over a 10-kilometre stretch of countryside, the turbines can produce enough electricity to power 15,000 typical NSW homes.

On a dairy farm near the South Coast town of Gerringong, what may be Australia's smallest wind energy company, Rewind Energy, has switched on its first wind energy station - a single turbine, generating up to 10 kWs. While sufficient to power no more than three homes, "it's enough electricity for the farmer", Rewind Energy director Stuart Thomson said.

He estimated the turbine would "produce $3000 to $4000 worth of electricity a year". Any surplus power could be sold back into the electricity grid, earning the farmer money. With government rebates and other incentives, the turbine should pay for itself in about 10 years. "After that they have free electricity," Mr Thomson said.

He believed that despite their ability to churn out "green energy", the wind turbines' selling point for farmers was the economics of being largely independent from the commercial energy grid. "Farmers are running a business, and electricity prices are going up and up," he said. Mr Thomson conceded that wind energy was unlikely to replace solar energy as the main source of renewable power in urban areas.

"Putting up 12-metre towers in someone's backyard is going to cause issues," he said. "But in rural areas they make sense. Australia has some of the best wind resources in the world." An Origin Energy spokeswoman estimated that the Cullerin Range windfarm increased NSW's total operational commercial wind energy capacity from 16.6 MWs to 46.6 MWs - still a tiny fraction of the state's energy needs and way behind the capacity of all other states, except Queensland.