Conergy's Bold Australian Wind Farm Plan

Vivian Wai-yin Kwok, Forbes.com, 10.08.07, 11:19 AM ET

German solar power company Conergy is seeking approval to build the largest windmill in Australia, taking a 2 billion Australian dollar ($1.8 billion) bet on the country's Parliament passing legislation supporting renewable energy.

Under Conergy's blueprint, 500 turbines will be placed near the hamlet of Silverton, New South Wales, in the five years starting from 2009. With a total capacity of 1,000 megawatts, the project aims at producing energy for 400,000 homes, meeting about 4.5% of the state's electricity demand. The German-designed wind farm would be 10 times bigger than the next-largest wind farm approved for the state and could reduce Australia's carbon dioxide emissions by at least 3 million tons of a year.

The proposal was unveiled Monday in The Sydney Morning Herald.

The site has some of the best wind resources in the country. Silverton, a small village at the western extreme of New South Wales, 25 kilometers (16 miles) northwest of Broken Hill, is best known as the backdrop for several Australian movies such as Mad Max II (known in America as The Road Warrior) and A Town Like Alice. The fact that the village is inhabited by only a handful of artists makes it less difficult for Conergy to propose the windmill project.

Conergy's plan follows the news that the federal government is setting a mandatory clean energy target of 30,000 gigawatt hours of electricity a year nationwide by 2020. Australian Prime Minister John Howard last month revealed that the government intends to pursue a goal of 15% of electricity coming from renewable energy by 2020, while New South Wales plans to generate 10% of its power from environmental friendly resources by 2010.

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