Queensland sets new wind output record as it plays catch up to rest of country

Queensland, which likes to call itself the Sunshine State, has set a new wind output record as it seeks to catch up on the rest of the country in terms of wind energy and renewables in particular.

The new record output of 704MW early on Tuesday morning was spotted by the data crunchers at GPE Nemlog 2, and can be expected to be bettered as two new wind farms work through their commissioning process, and a series of even bigger projects also join the grid in coming months.

Queensland was relatively late to the wind energy scene with only a couple of turbines on Thursday island, and the small 12MW Windy Hill project the only generation from wind before 2018, when the 180MW Mt Emerald wind farm joined the grid.

Since then the state has added the 453MW Cooper’s Gap wind farm, the Kennedy renewable energy park, and more recently the 157MW Kaban and the 173MW Dulacca wind farms have joined the grid, although these latter two are yet to reach full capacity.

The country’s biggest wind project to date, the 1.02GW McIntyre wind project is now under construction, as is the 450MW first stage of Andrew Forrest’s Clarke Creek wind project. Others are also in the pipeline, including the Mt Hopeful and Tarong West wind farms.

Tuesday’s new output record for wind was set 10 mintues after midnight on Tuesday, with a high score of 694.7MW, beating out the previous benchmark set on December 21 last year, also in the middle of the night.

With sustained wind levels across eastern Australia the last few days, Queensland wind also recorded a maximum Rolling 1 Day Mean record of 608.6 MW at 01:50 hrs on Tuesday morning, according to GPE NemLog2.

They supplied this graph below which shows how late Queensland was to the wind game, with most other states having some wind output nearly a decade earlier.

Victoria leads the way in terms of raw output, and has enjoyed an 80 per cent increase in capacity from 1,836MW to 3,305MW since May 2020, and has begun work on the first 750MW stage of what will be the biggest wind project in the country, the Golden Plans facility.