Community wind power to the people of Hepburn, Victoria
Australian community wind delivers power to the people Recharge 22 June 11 Community wind farms are no stranger to the US — where the sector is comparable to the size of the entire Australian commercial wind industry. But Australia has been slow to jump on the community bandwagon. Low-cost electricity generated from the country’s vast coal and gas reserves provides real challenges to the economics, while connecting windy but often remote regions to the national grid is difficult and expensive.
Enter the pioneers of the Hepburn Wind Park — Australia’s first co-operative wind farm, about 100km northwest of Melbourne, Victoria.
Commissioned this week, nearly four years after the co-operative was registered, Hepburn’s two 2MW turbines now supply enough electricity to power 2,300 homes — 300 more than are in the area.
The community-owned project moved from dream to reality in April last year, when Germany’s REpower signed a contract to build the wind farm, and a final offer for 1.8 million shares was released.
An investment of more than A$7.5m ($7.9m) from 1,000 members of the co-operative, coupled with a A$3.1m loan from the local Bendigo Bank and a A$975,000 grant from the state government provided the finance for the A$12.9m project.
Proponents say wind farms such as Hepburn make sense on two levels.
Being embedded in the community means the approval process encounters less local opposition, and the economics of small- to medium-scale distributed generation is cost-effective.
“When citizens see a new wind or solar project, it shouldn’t be from the sidelines,” the founding chairman of Hepburn Wind Park, Simon Holmes à Court, tells Recharge.
“They should see it from the front seat, where they have hitched their wagon to environmental and economic progress by investing.”…..
No comments yet.
1 This month
of the week – Disrupting War & Militarism in Oceania. Active solidarity. Radical practice.
Antinuclear 
Leave a comment