Australia sets new wind energy record, breaks 3GW for first time

Wind power generation in Australia reached a new record on Tuesday morning, peaking just below 3,000MW for the first time.

The level was reached at 7.55am, with output of 2,988MW of wind capacity – 81 per cent of the rates 3,667MW of capacity in the National Electricity Market.  It broke the previous record of 2,848MW set on December 16 last year.

The figure is for the National Electricity Market, which does not include Western Australia and other remote grids.

The Collgar wind farm in Western Australia was also producing more than 50MW of capacity at the time, and other wind farms in WA were also operating, so he output of wind farms in Australia peaked above 3,000MW for first time. Also, the NEM data does not include wind farms such as Toora, Hampden, Crookwell and Blayney wind farms, which have a combined capacity of 37MW.

With the addition of 26MW of “big solar” – essentially two solar farms, the partly completed Nyngan solar farm and the Royalla solar farm in the ACT, generation of large scale renewable energy in the NEM was also above 3GW.

This does not include rooftop solar, which was producing around 397MW of capacity at the time (rooftop solar tends to peak later in the day).

Here’s another visualisation of the moment at 8am, provided by NEM-Watch. A live update of the output can be seen here. Again, this graph does not include W.A.

The biggest input came from South Australia, with 1066MW of output, closely followed by Victoria, with 1021MW of output, including 388MW from Australia’s largest wind farm, the 420MW Macarthur facility.

NSW accounted for 582M@, Tasmania 210MW, while Queensland delivered a big fat zero. The only wind farm in Queensland is the small Windy Hill facility in the north, which is just 12MW and not registered with AEMO data.