One of Australia’s oldest wind farms gets makeover and a new 15-year lease on life

One of Australia’s oldest wind farms, a two-turbine project that has slashed diesel fuel use on Queensland’s Thursday Island, is having a makeover that is expected to extend its operating life by another 15 years.

Regional Queensland network company Ergon Energy flagged on LinkedIn the $2 million refurbishment of the Torres Strait island’s wind farm, which has been in operation since 1997.

Ergon supplies electricity to more than 1400 customers on Thursday Island, situated off the northern-most tip of the Australian mainland, where annual energy use is around 24,600 megawatt hours.

First commissioned in 1997 to slash the remote island community’s reliance on diesel fuel, the wind farm is made up of two Vestas V29/225 wind turbines on 30 meter towers, with a combined nominal capacity of 450kW.

According to Ergon, the two turbines have generated more than 18,921MWh of renewable energy over their lifetime so far, saving an average of 220,000 litres of diesel a year.

The refurbishment will lower the blades, nacelle (head of the turbine where the generating equipment is located) and the tower segments.

The blades and tower segments will remain on-site for standard maintenance, including a new coat of paint.
The generating equipment will be shipped to South Australia for an overhaul at a specialist wind turbine facility.

A large crane – which Ergon says was already on the island for another job, saving on costs – will begin taking components down this week and disassembly will be done around April 23 or 24, weather permitting.

Ergon says that once the refurbished turbines are up and running again – in three to four months – they will save an average of 7,000 litres of diesel a week and operate for another 15 years.

“It’s one of the many ways we are working to decarbonise remote communities,” an Ergon spokesperson told RenewEconomy.

“We expect the newly-refurbished wind turbines will provide 15 years of reliable and efficient operation.”

As noted above, the Thursday Island wind farm is one of the oldest in Australia, ahead of Tilt Renewables Crookwell 1 project in New South Wales, whose eight, 600kW turbines have been generating power since 1998.

Western Australia lays claim to the nation’s first commercial wind farms, starting with the Salmon Beach Wind Farm near Esperance, with six turbines that operated for nearly 15 years.

The asset was decommissioned in 2002 due to the age of the turbines and urban encroachment. In 1993, it was superseded by the nine-turbine Ten Mile Lagoon wind farm, west of Esperance.

With the first of Australia’s wind farms nearing the end of their operational lives, project owners must decide what to do with the old turbines and whether to repower sites that occupy some of the nation’s best wind power resources.

As RenewEconomy explains here, repowering is when old turbines are replaced with new ones, as opposed to refurbishment or decommissioning, which is when a site is returned to its previous state and use – usually farmland.

For small projects like Thursday Island, the task of refurbishing the existing turbines is fairly straightforward.

But for other projects, repowering with bigger more powerful turbines can be a complex operation, with significant costs and hurdles, including the renegotiation of new connection agreements, and regaining landowner and community buy-in for bigger turbines.