One of Australia’s smallest wind farms powers up in Victoria

A tiny 7.4MW wind farm in Victoria’s Wimmera region has started to power up, registering (very) small amounts of power from its spot on the grid in the state’s far west.

Built by BayWa r.e., the Diapur wind farm consists of just two Vestas V150 turbines on farmland in a windy spot around 3km south of the township of the same name.

Despite its small size, the wind farm will generate enough renewable energy to power 6,000 households, which is roughly three times the population of the nearby township of Nhill.

According to the website, construction of the project was undertaken in 2020 by Vestas and balance of plant contractor Consolidated Power Projects.

Grid connection line works were undertaken by Powercor through the course of 2021 with full operation commencing late this year – as illustrated in the graph below supplied to RenewEconomy by data analyst Craig Fryer.

As Fryer noted on LinkedIn, the Diapur project is “a very unusual wind farm by today’s standards,” with new projects rarely coming in below 100MW and many targeting hundreds of megawatts, like WestWind Energy’s 800MW Golden Plains project in Victoria’s south west.

But it is not the smallest wind farm in Australia; not even the smallest in Victoria. Smaller still is the two-turbine, 4.1MW Hepburn wind farm – Australia’s first community-owned wind farm, about 100km north-west of Melbourne.