Drive the Bass Highway out past Woodside Beach toward Golden Beach and you’ll see the fishing boats still working Lake Reeve’s mouth same as they have for decades. Nobody out there is looking at turbines on the horizon yet, because there aren’t any. That’s the thing about the Gippsland offshore wind zone that gets lost in the national coverage: it was declared back in December 2022, the first such zone in the country, and as of October 2026 not one turbine foundation has gone into the seabed. Licences, yes. Feasibility work, yes. Steel in the water, no.
I’ve spent a fair chunk of the past year going back through the feasibility licence conditions and sitting in on the community information sessions Star of the South and the other proponents have been running around Sale and Yarram. The gap between the promotional material and the development reality is the story here, and it’s worth being precise about where that gap actually sits.
The zone, and what was actually declared
The Gippsland zone runs off the Ninety Mile Beach coastline, broadly from Seaspray out past Golden Beach, covering roughly 15,000 square kilometres of Commonwealth waters under the Offshore Electricity Infrastructure Act 2021. That’s the framework the federal government built specifically to licence offshore wind, and Gippsland was its first live test. The then-Minister for Climate Change and Energy declared the zone with an eye to replacing the generation capacity Victoria is losing as its brown coal fleet winds down, most notably at Loy Yang and Yallourn.
Six feasibility licences were eventually granted across the zone, covering a theoretical capacity that proponents like to describe in the range of 18 to 25 gigawatts combined. I’d treat that top-line figure with real caution. A feasibility licence lets a company investigate a patch of ocean: do the met-ocean studies, survey the seabed, model wind resource, talk to fishers and traditional owners. It is not a construction approval, it is not a grid connection agreement, and it is nowhere close to a final investment decision. Victoria’s own offshore wind policy framework, through the Department of Energy, Environment and Climate Action, has long flagged a 2GW target by 2032 and 9GW by 2040 for the state overall – numbers that assume a fraction of what the licensed capacity suggests will ever get built.
Star of the South: where it actually stands
Star of the South is the project everyone names first, and for good reason. It’s the most advanced proposal in the zone, backed by a consortium that has included Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners and Cbus Super among its investors over the life of the project. It’s targeting up to 2.2 gigawatts off the Gippsland coast, with a proposed connection into the Latrobe Valley grid where the coal plants currently sit.
That connection point matters more than any megawatt figure on a slide. The existing transmission infrastructure around Loy Yang and Yallourn was built to move power out of coal generators, not to absorb variable output from turbines sitting twenty-plus kilometres offshore. Star of the South has talked about using existing substation capacity as coal units retire, which is sensible in theory. It’s exactly the kind of brownfield connection logic that should make projects cheaper and faster. But “should” is doing a lot of work in that sentence until AEMO’s connection studies and the actual transmission augmentation are locked down. I’ve read enough connection applications for onshore wind farms that stalled for years waiting on network studies to not take a planned connection date at face value until the agreement is signed.
Star of the South submitted its environmental approvals documentation under the EPBC Act some time ago and has been through extensive public consultation rounds. The project’s own public statements have pointed to a final investment decision and construction start later in the decade, not before. Nobody serious in this sector is promising Gippsland power before the early 2030s at best, whatever the renders suggest.
The other licence holders, and why six doesn’t mean six projects
Beyond Star of the South, the zone’s other feasibility licences sit with a mix of developers including Flotation Energy, BlueFloat Energy (in partnership with Energy Estate), and Equinor Renewables, among others. Each has its own feasibility work underway, its own timeline, and – critically – its own exposure to the same connection bottleneck through the Latrobe Valley or via a prospective subsea link.
I’d put real money on fewer than half of those six licences converting into fully consented, financed projects. That’s not a dig at the companies; it’s how feasibility-stage offshore wind portfolios have played out everywhere else, including the UK’s Dogger Bank rounds, where early-stage allocations get winnowed hard once actual engineering, grid studies and financing costs come in. Readers who followed what happened at the Illawarra zone, where the originally proposed area shrank dramatically and BlueFloat’s local ambitions didn’t survive contact with community and defence airspace objections, will recognise the pattern. I wrote about that one for this site – see the Illawarra offshore wind zone’s shrinking footprint, and Gippsland is not immune to the same forces, even with a friendlier coastal geography and less competing shipping traffic.
Community pushback: the real texture, not the slogan version
The pushback in Gippsland isn’t uniform and it isn’t all what you’d expect from the “stop the turbines” placards that get photographed at Golden Beach community halls. Commercial and recreational fishers around Lakes Entrance have raised genuine concerns about exclusion zones during construction and ongoing navigation around turbine arrays, concerns that are being worked through via the Ninety Mile Beach fishing industry liaison processes the proponents have set up. Tourism operators around the Ninety Mile Beach coastline – a stretch locals will tell you rivals anywhere on the east coast for surf and solitude, and I’ve done my own share of early starts out there for a swim before the wind picks up – have mixed views, with some worried about visual amenity from the beach and others pointing out the turbines will sit far enough offshore to be a faint silhouette on a clear day at best.
The more substantive objections have come through the formal consultation and referral processes under Commonwealth environmental law, covering matters like orange-bellied parrot migration corridors and potential impacts on underwater cultural heritage and Gunaikurnai sea country. These aren’t objections that get resolved by a glossy brochure; they require the kind of detailed environmental impact statement work that takes years, not months, and genuinely can reshape or shrink a project’s footprint – again, as Illawarra showed.
My honestly contrarian view, for what it’s worth: the loudest public fight in Gippsland so far has been more about Victoria’s broader offshore wind ambition and cost-of-living politics than about this specific zone’s merits. State politicians on both sides have used Star of the South as a political football well ahead of any construction decision being made, which does nobody, supporters or opponents, any favours when the actual planning questions are this granular and site-specific.
Why the grid connection is the real story, not the turbine count
Victoria’s transition away from brown coal is running on a tighter clock than its offshore wind pipeline. Yallourn is scheduled to close in 2028, and the broader state coal exit is a story I’ve tracked elsewhere on this site – see EnergyAustralia’s countdown to Yallourn’s exit. If Gippsland offshore wind’s earliest realistic generation isn’t flowing until well into the next decade, there’s a real multi-year gap that onshore renewables, batteries and gas peaking plant have to cover. That’s the broader firming conversation AEMO’s Integrated System Plan grapples with, and it’s worth reading in full rather than via the headline capacity numbers – I’d point readers to what the AEMO Integrated System Plan actually says for the detail.
The technical piece that doesn’t get enough attention is what offshore wind actually does to grid stability compared with onshore. Offshore turbines are typically larger, their output profile is smoother because offshore wind resource is more consistent, and the connection infrastructure required (offshore substations, subsea cabling, onshore converter stations) is an order of magnitude more complex and expensive than bolting a wind farm onto an existing rural feeder. Readers wanting the mechanics of that comparison should look at onshore versus offshore wind: the grid connection test, which goes through exactly why a gigawatt of offshore capacity isn’t a like-for-like swap with the same nameplate onshore.
The cost question nobody wants to answer yet
No Gippsland offshore wind proponent has published a binding capital cost figure for a full project, and that’s not unusual at this stage: final costs depend on foundation type, cable routing, and the outcome of ongoing supply chain negotiations for turbines and installation vessels, none of which exist in Australia yet. The fixed-bottom foundations likely to suit most of the Gippsland zone’s water depths are cheaper than the floating technology needed further offshore or in deeper Tasmanian and WA prospects, a distinction I went through in fixed-bottom versus floating offshore wind: why depth decides. That’s a genuine advantage Gippsland holds over some of the other declared zones. But cheaper relative to floating offshore wind still means vastly more expensive than onshore wind or solar per megawatt installed, and that cost has to clear a threshold under the Commonwealth’s Capacity Investment Scheme or equivalent support mechanisms before any bank signs off on construction finance.
The Clean Energy Regulator’s published data on large-scale generation certificates gives a sense of how far offshore wind sits from mainstream deployment in Australia right now. It simply isn’t generating certificates yet because nothing is operating. Anyone wanting the primary data on what is actually connected and generating today should go straight to the Clean Energy Regulator’s published registers rather than developer projections.
What I’d watch next
Three things will tell you more about Gippsland’s real trajectory than any renewed government statement of ambition. First, whether Star of the South reaches a final investment decision and actually signs a binding grid connection agreement with AEMO. That’s the hard gate every onshore and offshore project eventually has to clear, and it’s covered well in AEMO’s own connections and planning material. Second, how many of the remaining five feasibility licences convert to commercial licences under the Offshore Electricity Infrastructure framework versus quietly lapsing. Third, whether the environmental approvals process produces a project footprint materially smaller than what’s currently licensed, which based on precedent elsewhere I’d call the likely outcome rather than the exception.
Until then, the honest status of the Gippsland offshore wind zone is this: declared, licensed, surveyed, consulted on, and still years from a single turbine turning. That’s not a knock on the ambition. It’s just where the paperwork and the physics actually are, as of today.
– Callum Hayes, Wind & Offshore Correspondent
Photo by Jackie Alexander on Unsplash