Graph of the Day: Australia’s best performing wind farms in August

August was a good month for wind output in parts of Australia, particularly in NSW which was the location of six of the best performing wind farms in the country.

Following Tuesday’s publication of the best performing solar farms in the month of August, today we publish – also courtesy of Rystad Energy – the best performing wind farms, in terms of capacity factor for the month.

The most notable thing about the four best performing wind farms – Woodlawn, Boco Rock, Gunning and Taralga – is that they are all located in southern NSW – and all feature capacity factors of more than 50 per cent.

This may, or may not, be particularly satisfying for federal energy minister Angus Taylor, because two of the wind farms are located in his electorate of Hume – an area of “wind swept tablelands and gentle slopes and plains” as he described it in his maiden speech in parliament in 2013, which he delivered shortly after his star appearance at the “Wind Fraud rally” in Canberra – and another of these top performing wind farms is located near his family home in the Monaro.

Taylor, of course, has been a fierce critic of wind farms.

Other farms to find themselves in the top 10 for the month were scattered across Victoria, South Australia and Western Australia.

In fact, the graph to the right above shows that many wind farms had capacity factors of more than 40 per cent during the month of August (represented in blue), while the three wind farms with capacity factors of less than 10 per cent are newly connected wind farms that have not yet reached full capacity.

These include Dundonnell in Victoria, Biala in NSW, Granville Harbour in Tasmania and Warradarge in W.A.

Finally, this next graph, also from Rystad Energy, shows the growing share of renewables generation (green line) in WEM, the W.A. based electricity Market over the last eight years. Wind energy (in blue) has grown significantly, coal has fallen substantially (black line), but gas (yellow) is barely changed. Just goes to show that renewables can and do replace coal.

Note: Story corrected to make clear that second graph related to the WEM, and not the NEM as it appeared originally.