Musselroe, the largest wind farm in Tasmania

Hi there, I’m Jervis Whitley. Today is Friday, 28th of June, and you’re listening to WindFront. The weekly roundup of the wind industry from Australia and around the world. Today I’ll cover the weekly top 3 earners, and commissioning corner. Musselroe joins the National Electricity Market.

First up, let’s talk about who is earning the most in wind. This week, our top three, Macarthur, North Brown Hill, and Waubra, with Macarthur topping a $1,000,000, $1,100,000 in a week, to be exact. North Brown Hill was down at 684,000 bucks. And Waubra earned 590,000 bucks this week. This is a really big week in wind. Overall, the wind industry cleared over $9,000,000 this week. We have $530,000 of that in South Australia, a huge week.

So that’s it for our top 3 in wind, and we’ll move on to the commissioning corner, where the National Electricity Market opens its arms to Musselroe, the newest wind farm to join the market. So Musselroe is now entering its final testing and commissioning phases before it runs at full output. It’s a wind farm that’s in the top right-hand corner of Tasmania. The largest in Tasmania, that’s been built there. And its size is about 168 megawatts, which I’ve read in an article on ABC that could power 2 towns, Burnie and Devonport, which seems like a lot of power. It’s reported to have cost around 400 million bucks and was built by Hydro Tasmania.

You might, some bit of history behind Musselroe. You might have remembered another company involved with it called Roaring 40s. Roaring 40s was actually a joint venture between Hydro Tasmania and China Light and Power. And they initially planned to build Musselroe some years ago. And that partnership was ended in 2011 when Hydro Tasmania took over the operation and the building of Musselroe. So it was around December 2011 that Hydro Tasmania began construction on Musselroe, and it’s known only now in July 2013. So, you know, just under 2 years of development time, that the wind farm will be finally completely commissioned.

So the current status is that it’s fully operational. It’s actually connected to the grid and it’s producing power. In fact, it earned its owners just over $100,000 this week alone, which is no slouch. Top output so far this week had been around 42 megawatts and I looked into some of the constraints and it looked like maybe that they were limiting themselves to that number until their full commissioning had been completed. But I’m by no means certain about that. It started feeding to the grid in April 24. So between then and now, it has been feeding into the grid, though not at full capacity. I’m just waiting for the tests and commissioning to be completed, which would be in July apparently.

The next step up for Hydro Tasmania following Musselroe will be King Island, where the residents there have just voted in favour, 59% in favour for continuing with plans to build a new wind farm there. Which by some reports could be huge. One of the largest or at least the largest in Australia, built on this tiny island, King Island. So yeah, Hydro Tasmania will progress with some further studies on the King Island project, just as I think their main concerns were along the lines of sound impact. A lot of the residents were concerned that there might be low frequency sounds that roll over the hills and affect, I guess, the health of the townspeople or at least annoy them with this constant sound. So they’ll be looking at sound environmental impacts and a few other things, as a part of their special planning report.

So that’s it with our commissioning corner. We welcome Musselroe into the NEM fold. And this week, I probably won’t leave you with any big questions, but join us next week. I’ve got a special interview planned with Meridian Energy. You’ve just released an interesting report about the effect of wind on retail electricity prices. So that’ll be pretty interesting. So I hope you’d join me then. And then until I see you next time. Keep buying those green electrons.