The road block in front of the wind farm has disappeared. Now it’s full steam ahead for wind energy in Australia, and wind is blowing away Australian records. Under new management, wind power is encouraged and seems to be announcing every day a new announcement of a wind farm and power generation records are broken.
As I have written before, Australia needs much more wind energy. And it’s on its way. Australia has more than 7 GW installed wind power, with many more suggested. Offshore wind is in an early stage of development, but in time and with the support of the new federal government it should eventually dwarf the scale of onshore wind energy.
New South Wales establishes several “Renewable Energy Zones”. The South West REZ has received proposals for 34 GW of generation. Spark Infrastructure plans a 1 GW wind farm with BESS support, as well as a massive 2.5 GW hybrid wind-solar and battery storage project also located on the REZ.
Wind power generation in June set a record 2,839 GWh, Australia’s highest ever wind-driven month. This means that wind generation was the second largest source of electricity in June, after black coal. This is the place usually reserved for lignite. This trend is expected to continue as 3.5 GW of wind power is in the pipeline. It looks like the wind will continue to blow away Australian records.
At the end of July, South Australia achieved a new record for wind output of 2,062 MW, breaking the previous record of 2,051 MW set just six days earlier. This provided the state with 120% of the local electricity demand at the time. “The price later turned negative around 2 a.m. after the last of the piston engines shut down, then turned negative again during the day when the combined impact of wind and sun pushed more gas out of the system.”
Wind generation records were also set in Tasmania (191 GWh) and Victoria (1088 GWh).
It is still too early for offshore wind, but the developments are in the planning phase with Copenhagen Energy, an ambitious Danish developer of sustainable energy. It has unveiled a second massive 3GW offshore wind project off the coast of Western Australia, this time off the coast of Kalbarri, some 500km north of Perth. In time, that will be an additional 6 GW of power capacity to support the population and industry of Western Australia.
I’m at my computer in Queensland at 4pm and about 5 GW of wind energy is blowing into the Australian grid. These green blocks on the power output graph are getting bigger. They will get even bigger and there will be cheap, renewable energy to support the dreams of a green energy future. It’s exciting to watch the records fall.
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