New England REZ: where the wind-solar-storage build actually stands
Uralla’s main street doesn’t look like the centre of a 8GW renewable energy zone, and that’s rather the point. You drive out past the showground, past the turnoff to Bundarra, and the hills roll on looking much as they have for a century, until you spot a line of turbine blades stacked on low-loaders at […]
Iberdrola Australia: the Spanish major building quietly
Drive the Augusta Highway north out of Port Augusta and you pass the old Northern and Playford power station sites before you even get to the turbines. That’s not incidental. Iberdrola Australia’s Port Augusta Renewable Energy Park sits on ground that used to burn South Australian brown coal, and the company has been happy enough […]
Tilt Renewables: the super-fund wind book, turbine by turbine
Rye Park’s turbines are visible from the Hume Highway now, strung along the ridgeline between Yass and Boorowa, and that’s the thing about Tilt Renewables: it’s one of the few wind developers in this country where you can actually stand on a public road and count the finished product rather than squint at a render. […]
Illawarra offshore wind: the zone shrank, BlueFloat didn’t
Stand at the Bald Hill lookout on Lawrence Hargrave Drive, above the Sea Cliff Bridge at Coalcliff, and on a clear day you can see the container ships queued off Port Kembla waiting for a berth. That queue is a decent visual metaphor for the Illawarra offshore wind zone right now. Plenty of interest sitting […]
Onshore vs offshore wind: the grid connection test
Six years. That’s roughly the gap, on current form, between an onshore wind farm getting a connection agreement from a transmission network service provider and an offshore project doing the same thing anywhere in Australian waters. Not six years to build – six years just to get from a declared zone to a signed connection […]
Onshore versus offshore wind: which one gets built first
Two hundred and twenty-eight turbines. That’s the figure BlueFloat Energy has floated for its Illawarra project off Wollongong, in one of the six zones declared under the Commonwealth’s offshore wind framework. It sounds enormous until you check AEMO’s connection queue and realise not one of those turbines has a firm grid agreement yet. Meanwhile, up […]
Illawarra offshore wind zone: BlueFloat’s status, minus the render
Stand on Bald Hill at Stanwell Park on a clear morning and you can see most of the Illawarra coast from Wollongong down past Kiama. You can’t yet see a single turbine out there, and depending who you ask, that’s either a relief or a missed opportunity a decade in the making. The declared zone […]
ACEN Australia: the Philippines-backed builder behind New England Solar
Drive the New England Highway south out of Uralla on a clear afternoon and you’ll see it before you see much else: rows of panels running off toward Walcha, a substation compound with more transformers than you’d expect for a paddock, and a construction camp that’s shrunk from its peak but hasn’t gone away. That’s […]
GE Vernova in Australia: turbines, warranty trouble and a thinning market
Sixty-four turbines. That was the original plan for Tilt Renewables’ Rye Park Wind Farm in southern New South Wales, and GE Vernova’s 3.x-158 platform was selected to fill all of them. The project was one of the cleaner proofs that GE could still win large Australian onshore contracts after the chaotic global restructure that split […]
Offshore wind: fixed-bottom versus floating turbines
Thirty metres of water is roughly where the argument starts. Below that depth, fixed-bottom offshore wind is proven, financeable and, in European terms, almost boring. Above it, floating wind is still earning its industrial credentials. Australia’s six declared offshore wind zones straddle both worlds, and the technology choice sitting inside each development application will shape […]