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 the New England Highway, contractors are still bolting together the MacIntyre Wind Farm’s blades in paddocks that had development approval before most people had heard the words “floating foundation”. That gap, between the render and the reality, is the whole story of onshore versus offshore wind in this country right now.
I’ve spent a fair chunk of the past year going through development applications and state planning portals for both. The onshore projects have paperwork you can actually read end to end. The offshore ones mostly have feasibility licences, community consultation reports and a lot of very good graphics. That’s not a criticism of the technology. It’s a description of where each sits in the approvals pipeline, and it matters for anyone trying to work out which one actually keeps the lights on this decade.
The turbine-count trap #
Developers love a big number. Announce 200-plus turbines and 2.5 gigawatts of “potential capacity” and the headline writes itself. But potential capacity isn’t dispatchable capacity, and it isn’t even planning-approved capacity half the time. Onshore developers learned this lesson the hard way over the past decade, scaling back turbine counts repeatedly as council overlays, aviation radar constraints and connection studies bit into the original concept. Squadron Energy’s Clarke Creek project in Queensland went through several iterations before settling into what’s actually being built.
Offshore is doing the same dance now, just earlier in the cycle and with bigger machines. A 15-megawatt floating turbine off Gippsland does more work per unit than a 4-megawatt onshore tower from a decade ago, so raw turbine counts across the two technologies aren’t even comparable. I’d treat any headline figure from either side as an opening bid, not a fact.
Onshore wind: the numbers that actually stack up #
Onshore is the incumbent for a reason. Australia has been building it since the Woolnorth project in Tasmania in the early 2000s, and the supply chain, the construction crews and the grid connection process are all mature. MacIntyre, out near Warwick, is now one of the largest single wind developments in the southern hemisphere and it went from turbine installation to commissioning stages without the kind of marine approvals saga offshore projects face. Land access is negotiated directly with farmers, not contested across a Commonwealth declared zone with fishing fleets, shipping lanes and Defence sign-off all in the mix.
The trade-off is that the best onshore wind resource in the National Electricity Market is increasingly a long way from load. New England, western Victoria, parts of South Australia. That’s transmission cost, and it’s part of why AEMO’s Integrated System Plan keeps flagging the need for new interstate lines as the binding constraint on how fast onshore wind can actually be absorbed, not the turbines themselves. I wrote a while back about the broader rise of wind energy in this country, and the pattern holds: the wind farms aren’t the bottleneck, the wires are.
Offshore wind: the Illawarra test case #
The Illawarra zone is the one I watch most closely, partly because it’s the one closest to an existing industrial load centre — Wollongong’s steelworks and the Port Kembla precinct — rather than in the middle of nowhere. BlueFloat has been through the community engagement rounds and holds a feasibility licence there, but a feasibility licence is not a commercial licence, and it’s certainly not a grid connection agreement. The zone itself was trimmed by the federal government after community and shipping-lane objections, smaller than what was originally proposed.
Gippsland is the other serious contender, further along in some respects because Star of the South has been working the space longer, but still facing the same fundamental issue: nothing floats on the water until someone signs a power purchase agreement and AEMO confirms a connection point can actually take the output. Offshore wind in Australia will very likely need floating foundations rather than fixed-bottom monopiles in most of the deeper water off the east coast, which is a genuinely different, more expensive engineering problem — I went through that split in more detail in fixed-bottom versus floating turbine technology, and it’s worth understanding before taking any offshore megawatt figure at face value.
Connection queues versus seabed leases #
This is the part that gets skipped in most coverage. Onshore wind connects through the standard NEM generator connection process, working through AEMO and the relevant network service provider, with a queue that’s long but well understood. Offshore wind in Australia has to first clear the Commonwealth’s declared zone and licensing process under the offshore electricity infrastructure framework administered by the Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water, and only then get in the same connection queue everyone else is in.
That’s two regulatory gates instead of one, and the second gate — the seabed licence — is brand new machinery with no completed Australian project yet to point to as precedent. Every offshore proponent I’ve spoken with insists their timeline holds. I’d want to see steel in the water, or at minimum a signed connection agreement, before taking any of those dates as fixed. How the NEM actually dispatches power every five minutes doesn’t care about announcements; it cares about registered, connected capacity, and offshore wind has none yet.
Cost per megawatt-hour, honestly #
Onshore wind remains one of the cheapest forms of new generation in the NEM on a levelised cost basis, which is precisely why it keeps winning contracts under the Capacity Investment Scheme. I’ve written before about how that scheme is, in effect, quietly picking winners, and onshore wind and battery storage are consistently among them. Offshore wind, by contrast, is expensive everywhere it’s been built, including the UK and northern Europe, before local costs come down through scale. Australia doesn’t have that scale yet, doesn’t have a specialised installation vessel fleet, and doesn’t have a local supply chain for the turbine components. All of that gets priced in.
The honest case for offshore isn’t that it’s cheap. It’s that it blows at night when solar doesn’t, it’s closer to load centres like Wollongong and the Latrobe Valley than the best onshore sites, and it doesn’t chew up agricultural land. Those are real advantages. They’re just not cost advantages, not yet, and anyone spruiking offshore wind as cheaper than onshore right now is getting ahead of the evidence.
Community and planning friction, compared #
Onshore wind fights council by council, overlay by overlay — visual amenity objections, shadow flicker complaints, occasionally a threatened species referral that stalls a project for a year or two. It’s grinding but it’s familiar, and most experienced developers have a playbook for it.
Offshore fights a different kind of battle: commercial fishing operators, shipping channels, whale migration paths, and coastal communities worried about sightlines from the beach. I swim most mornings off Newcastle, out past the baths along Bathers Way toward Merewether, and there’s a live argument in the Hunter about whether turbines on the horizon off Port Stephens would even be visible from shore on a clear day. Genuine question, not a rhetorical one — the modelling differs depending on turbine height and distance from the coast, and that argument alone has shaped how far out the Hunter zone was ultimately drawn.
Which one actually gets built next #
My honest read, having sat through enough of both onshore and offshore consultation sessions to have a view: onshore wind is what firms the grid over the next five years, and offshore wind is a 2030s story at the earliest for Australia, not a 2026 one. That’s not a knock on the technology. Europe took the better part of two decades to get offshore wind costs down to where they are now, and Australia is starting from a standing start with a regulatory framework that’s barely three years old.
If I had to bet where Capacity Investment Scheme money actually lands as delivered megawatts by the end of this decade, I’d put most of it onshore, with offshore contributing a genuinely useful but much smaller slice than the zone maps suggest. The turbine counts on those maps are a starting position for a negotiation with AEMO, the states and the Commonwealth, not a construction schedule. Worth remembering next time a developer’s render shows two hundred turbines standing in neat rows against a sunset. Check the connection agreement first. The rest is aspiration.
— Callum Hayes, Wind & Offshore Correspondent
Photo by Nicholas Doherty on Unsplash