Massive Neoen wind farm joins race to become Australia’s first in a commercial pine plantation

French renewables giant Neoen is seeking approval to build a massive new wind farm in Victoria, adding the project to the race to become Australia’s first to be located within an actively managed and harvested pine forest.

The Kentbruck Green Power Hub (KGPH) proposes to install up to 105 wind turbines (down from the 157 originally proposed and exhibited for public comment on the Victorian planning portal) on a mix of private and public land in Victoria’s south-west, in between Portland and Nelson.

An updated Environmental Effects Statement (EES) on the project website says around 22 per cent of land in the project area is freehold
land primarily used for grazing, while around 78% is commercial pine plantation.

Neoen says the proposed KGPH project would have a total capacity of around 600 megawatts (MW), produce around 2,000 gigawatt-hours of electricity each year and have an operational life of about 30 years.

The wind farm is expected to generate around $1.2 billion in investment and create at least 350 jobs during construction and 14 jobs when
operational.

The KGPH has also been selected for federal Labor’s competitive Capacity Investment Scheme’s first tender for generation – the only Victorian wind farm to qualify in that round.

The co-location of wind turbines with commercial tree plantations is being proposed in a number of Australian states, including the Forest Wind project in Queensland and the much contested 205 MW Delburn wind farm in Victoria, which is shaping up to be the first wind farm to be built in a pine forest.

In New South Wales, TagEnergy’s massive up to 2 gigawatt (GW) Pines wind project is one of three awarded feasibility permits in the central west by Forestry Corp last year, with the others being a 500 MW project called Sunny Corner proposed by Mainstream Renewables and Someva Renewables, and Iberdola’s Four Mile Creek project, formerly called Canobolas.

A fourth permit was issued to Neoen Australia for the Bondo wind project in the south of the state near Tumut.

Neoen Australia’s Alicia Webb says the benefit of siting projects in a pine plantation is that their impact on native vegetation is usually very low.

“That plantation is exotic monoculture so has a relatively low biodiversity value. It’s regularly harvested, which means it works well to put a wind farm in it,” Webb said in a statement shared with Renew Economy.

“It’s quite a good symbiotic use of land because there are already roads through the pine plantation, there’s already access for fire trucks and things like that.”

That said, the project team will still have to convince both state and federal authorities that it can minimise any impact on native fauna, including
southern bent-wing bat, red-tailed black cockatoo, orange-bellied parrot and migratory shorebirds.