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Renewables Documentation: Construction of Waubra Wind Farm

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01/27/2009

Waubra, a tiny town north of Melbourne, will soon host 129 turbines when finished in 2009. The Spanish company Acciona is behind it, and their Australian MD says “We’ve delivered something like about 200 million dollars into various projects or various contracts to local providers”. The power produced from Waubra will be enough for a town the size of Ballarat (nearly 100,000 people) and it will deliver approximately 650,000 tonnes of CO2 savings. Acciona has also provided about $1.6 million in community funding to the local area, to schools, sports and other facilities. The Waubra wind farm will be the biggest in the country when it starts up, but probably not for long. Victoria’s in for a local boom, there is about 300 MW of electrical capacity from the wind farms operating at the start of 2009, but this will more than double with those already under construction. Adding in the proposals which have approval to proceed takes this state alone to over 2,000MW capacity of wind power, comfortably accounting for twenty percent of peak demand for the state. In relation to the federal government’s twenty percent renewable energy target by 2020, that’s Victoria’s share accounted for in just a couple of years, from one single technology. Out at Waubra, half the turbines come from the Keppel Prince plant, where much of the workforce is local, and receive on-the-job training in the specialized business. Steve explains, “We have taken butchers bakers and fishermen and farmers and turned them into welders, blasters, painters, vehicle operators. We are all trained on the job.”