Final blade arrives to complete biggest wind farm in NSW

Less than a year after the Rye Park wind farm began generation from its enormous turbines, the last of 198 blades has arrived at the New South Wales site.

The 396MW project, near Yass in the NSW Southern Tablelands, and currently the biggest in the state, received the final 80m-long blade overnight – driven from the Port of Newcastle, owner Tilt Renewables said in a LinkedIn post.

The completed wind farm will host sixty six 6MW V162 Vestas turbines, each with a tip height of 200 metres. The farm is anticipated to produce on average 1,188 gigawatt hours (GWh) of electricity a year.

Tilt Renewables expects the wind farm to the fully operational by the middle of this year, completing a three-year construction effort on NSW’s largest wind farm.

When Rye Park began being built in 2021 the Vestas turbines were the largest to ever have been erected in Australia, but they were pipped last month by the Golden Plains wind farm which installed a 6.2 MW turbine.

About 55 per cent of energy production from the Rye Park wind farm is contracted to mining company Newcrest Mining under a 15-year power purchase agreement that will supply the Cadia gold mine in NSW.

The remainder is going to AGL Energy, which signed a 15-year power purchase agreement over the other 45 per cent and for the associated large-scale generation certificates (LGCs), which it’s on-selling to Microsoft.

LGCs are currently trading at $45 each.