Massive Moorabool wind farm completed, sending power to Victorian grid

The massive 312MW Moorabool wind farm in central-western Victoria has started to send some power to the National Electricity Market, following the completion of installation of all 104 of its wind turbines late last week.

Goldwind Australia said on Friday that all of the turbines for the project, located around 25km south-east of Ballarat, had been installed and that commissioning and project completion activities were now underway.

As illustrated in the chart below, supplied by Paul McArdle from Global Roam, the huge wind farm has also started registering its first significant blips of generation on the NEM (you will need to look carefully at the flat green lines – the orange line is the market price).

As RenewEconomy reported here, the Moorabool wind farm’s first turbine was connected to the state grid in July of this year,

Once fully operational, the $370 million project will produce enough wind power to cover the electricity demand of 228,000 Victorian homes, Goldwind said last week.

“Moorabool Wind Farm saw up to 300 local and regional people employed during the construction phase and will see up to 20 permanent full-time maintenance roles once operational,” said Goldwind Australia senior project manager, Dusan Hadzi-Nikolov in a statement.

“We are very pleased to continue partnering with the local community in delivering benefits over the operational life of the wind farm,” he added.

“Regular community fund grants are an example of this support, with the recent inaugural community fund grant seeing $125,000 distributed to 11 worthy local community groups.”

Goldwind bought the project from WestWind Energy in 2016 and started work on the second, 54-turbine section of the wind farm, Moorabool South, in late June.