Monday 12/2/2007 Page: 6
THE proposed Leonards Hill wind farm will feature at tomorrow night's Hepburn Shire Council draft agenda meeting. The council has a recommendation before it to grant a planning permit but must also weigh up submissions from 18 objectors and 325 supporters of the project. The Courier's deputy editor Nick Higgins looks at the issueSOME years ago Daylesford builder Per Bernard went to a public forum in Dean hosted by a large wind energy company. He didn't like what he heard. He sensed the community felt it was being dictated to and that the company had held the meeting only because it was a government requirement. As he and some fellow Daylesford residents drove home they talked about the possibilities of wind power. Each still felt wind energy had a future, but if renewable energy projects were to go ahead they would need community support.
Mr Bernard came to Australia from Denmark. where he had seen the roll-out of wind energy.
"One of our neighbours, a wholesale nursery person was one of the first in Denmark to install a larger wind turbine and everybody thought he was crazy. "He borrowed a lot of money, but within five years I think he paid back the loan from the extra electricity that he was producing above what he was using in his wholesale nursery - but of course in those five years a lot of other people learned how well a large wind turbine could help both financially and energy-wise.
"Denmark became the developer if you like, of small-scale community-owned windfarms, instead of what we're used to here in Australia where wind farms are fairly large in terns of the number of turbines. In Denmark the wind fare can be one turbine, maybe a couple or three because they are owned and developed by local communities.
"In most examples the size of the wind fare simply matches the needs of the community." Mr Bernard decided that approach could work at Daylesford. A small group of residents set up the Hepburn Renewable Energy Association with the aim of building a small-scale wind farm.
"So with the available wind, we have chosen two turbines of two megawatts each. A four megawatt system with the available wind will provide the equivalent amount of power that the 2000 to 2500 households in the area are using," he said.
The group is driven by a desire to act on lowering greenhouse gas emissions. The two wind turbines will cost the group $8 million, no small sum for a non-profit organisation with just over 400 members. Financial help has already arrived in the form of a $1 million grant from the Victorian Government. The association also enlisted the help of a Melbourne-based renewable energy company called Future Energy.
"We asked Future Energy to find good sites within 10km. "All the hills within 10km, except Leonards Hill, are in a significant landscape overlay which is a planning overlay that's done between Hepburn Shire and the Victorian Government and it's to protect all the hills." The association had hoped to have several sites to choose from, but in the end the choice was Leonards Hill or no hill at all.
"That was one flaw in our project, because we couldn't get the community to choose, we had to tell the community which one and while the reason was fine, it didn't allow the community to choose. "Now the only choice the community had was 'do we want it or not?"' The owners of the land are willing to accommodate the turbines and have agreed to a 25-year lease.
Mr Bernard said wind farms generate significant amounts of power in Denmark and the power grid has been modified to use it more effectively.
"The average Danish wind input is about 20 per cent. The wind industry in Denmark does occasionally provide up to 95 per cent of energy use. "Australia is far from being able to do something like that, partly because of the way our grid is built. But as Denmark's renewable energy generation has been rolled out over many years, the grid has been slightly changed to accommodate that.
"The baseload providers are much more flexible in Denmark and Germany, so typically whilst Denmark and Germany still use coal they are much more efficient and working at making it much more efficient.
"They also have a large generation capacity from gas. Gas is much more instantaneous, just like a gas hot water service, in being switched on and off on demand. "Denmark is now spending a huge amount of money.. . in decentralising energy. "It's not a natter of either/or, it's a matter of getting coal generated electricity as efficient and pollution free as possible. And starting to blend in all the other types of electricity generation we can think of to develop.
He said most Danish households were connected to broadband Internet and over the next 10 years there were plans to use it to monitor peak demands in electricity, which would allow instant switching on or off of various types of power generation.
"So baseload becomes less and less an issue, while it will always be an issue the more energy you have embedded in the local community, dependency on the baseload is lessened." Mr Bernard said the other significant part of the equation was getting people to use less energy.
Part of the profits from the proposed wind farm will go to community projects, which could include programs to cut energy use. The association is in the process of creating a co-operative that will own and operate the turbines.
The Leonards Hill proposal:
- Height of wind turbine towers: 68m
- Blade length: 41 m
- Blade tips move at up to 250kmh
- Revolutions per minute: 15
- Project cost: $8 million
- State Government funding: $1 million
- Cables from the turbines will run underground to the electricity
- grid and no substation will be required.
- There are no homes within 500m of the turbines, but 18 homes within 1km.
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