German-backed developer has second bite at Gippsland wind project after VCAT rejection

A small wind developer is trying for a second time to put a project in the patch of land between the Wilson’s Promontory national park in Victoria and the Gippsland renewable energy zone.

Synergy Wind wants to put a 13 turbine, 80 megawatt (MW) project around the 66 kilovolt (kV) power line that skirts the lower part of Gippsland, along with a 40 MW battery with an unspecified storage duration.

The project sits to the south of the recently proposed REZ, but comes with a backstory. 

Synergy Wind was launched in 2004, and is backed by a group of private wind investors from Germany.

The $388 million Gelliondale project is actually a re-launch of a project that the group tried to develop in the mid-2010s.

The original Alberton project was withdrawn eight years ago but wanted to put 34 turbines on a slightly larger patch of land to provide 100 MW of electricity. 

It won state approval and a green light under the federal EPBC in 2019, but a local community group took the project to the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal (VCAT), which ruled it broke planning guidelines by putting turbines too close to several houses. 

VCAT overturned the 2019 state planning approval, prompting the developer to return to the drawing board.

The Gelliondale project is “largely a re-submission” of its previous one but now accounts for local planning guidelines and includes new biodiversity assessments, Synergy Wind says in its planning application. 

“The proposal contains some similar elements and turbine locations to an earlier proposal known as the Alberton Wind Farm, but is smaller in scale,” the application says.

“The turbines in this proposal will have a maximum overall tip height of 210 metres above ground level, and a rotor diameter of up to 164 metres.

“The turbine nacelle, containing the generator, will be mounted on tubular steel and/or concrete towers. The maximum rotor size proposed affords a minimum ground clearance area beneath the rotor swept area of 40 metres.”

But the planning documents also hint at remaining community diffidence about the project, noting that background noise monitoring has to happen at 10 houses near proposed turbine spots, but it was only able to do so at five because “consent… was not granted at all preferred receivers”.

There are still homesteads within 1km of a turbine in the updated project, a factor that led to the original VCAT rejection in 2020, but this time Synergy Wind has gained consent from seven of those and it owns the other two.

The project is already deeply into the EPBC process, having been declared a controlled action in 2023. 

But for Victorian environmental approval it’s been able to lean on previous work for the larger Alberton project. 

The developers are proposing an annual $240,000 community benefits fund.

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