Contested wind project in South Australia wins federal nod as state heads towards 100 pct net renewables

A heavily contested wind project in South Australia has been given federal environmental approval, more than 10 years after the project was first proposed.

The 288 megawatt (MA) Palmer wind project was first proposed as a 114 turbine facility in 2013, and was quickly reduced to 103 after opposition by local landowners, including then AFL chief executive Gillon McLachlan and his friend Stirling McGregor, who was particularly keen to have the proposal knocked down despite not living in the area. 

McGregor’s campaign claimed that wind farms cause myriad health problems from cardiac arrhythmia to vivid and distressing nightmares and the project ended up in the Supreme Court of South Australia, where his case against the wind project was rejected in 2019. 

The wind farm had already won state planning approval a year earlier.

Last week, the final approval came through from the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation (EPBC) process which found it’s not a controlled action under the Act. 

Tilt Renewables now plans to install up to 40 turbines with a maximum tip height of 220m and a capacity of slightly more than 7 MW each. The site is currently used for grazing, and will continue to be.

The final site is right between the towns of Palmer and Tungkillo, about 50km directly east of Adelaide. Plans to spread the wind farm further north and south were abandoned which reduced the project’s footprint by some 500 hectares.

The original proposal made a decade ago was for turbines rated at just 3.3 MW each and with a maximum tip height of 165m. But time and technology has changed.

Tilt Renewables estimates that construction will start in late 2025 and be finished in late 2027-mid 2028, by which time the state government hopes to reach its accelerated target of 100 per cent “net” renewables.

The state’s biggest wind project, the 412 MW Goyder South wind farm, is currently under construction, although completion of the first stage has been delayed to early 2015 rather than late this year as previously hoped. South Australia produced 70 per cent of its electricity needs from wind and solar in the last 12 months.