Road to renewables, as CityLink switches to 100 pct Victorian wind power

Global toll-road operator Transurban has announced that the CityLink in Victoria will become that state’s first road to be powered by 100 per cent renewable energy, through an offtake deal with Australia’s biggest wind farm.

In a statement on Thursday, Transurban said all of the power required to operate CityLink, a 33km network of tollways in Melbourne, would be sourced from renewable energy by 2024.

A spokesperson from the company has since confirmed with RenewEconomy that the source of renewable energy would be the massive 530MW Stockyard Hill wind farm near Ballarat in Victoria, owned and operated by Goldwind.

No further details of the deal have been publicly revealed, except to note that Transurban has signed up to buy an amount of wind energy the equivalent of the annual electricity consumption of 3,000 average Victorian homes.*

“This agreement will support the growth of renewable energy in Victoria, as well as meaning CityLink’s many state-of-the-art safety features such as tunnel ventilation, dynamic electronic lane management and automatic incident detection will soon be wind powered,” Transurban said.

“We recognise that sustainability starts from the get-go, before cars even start driving on our roads, so this is just one of the changes we’re making to meet our net-zero target by 2050.

“From making sure that all our roads are designed and operated in ways that reduce vehicle carbon emissions and improve vehicle fuel efficiency to simpler switches such as changing on-road lights to low energy LEDs and reducing power consumption in tunnel ventilation systems, we’re evaluating the many ways our business can help create a more sustainable future,” the company said.

For regular users of the CityLink, the pain of forking out to drive from A to B might be lessened by the knowledge that at least some of the funds are helping to underwrite Victoria’s transition to 50 per cent renewables by 2030.

Although in reality, the deal Transurban has struck has most likely been brokered through Stockyard Hill’s primary off-taker, Origin Energy. So it might be better to think of it as helping Australia to quit coal.

The PPA struck by Goldwind and Origin stunned the clean energy industry back in 2017, by setting what was a new benchmark for renewables off-take deals in Australia, of below $55/MWh.

After such an auspicious start, however, the project then proceeded to be plagued by delays, only starting to send limited amounts of power to the grid July of 2021, despite having built the last of its 149 turbines in December of 2020.

*CORRECTION: An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated the PPA was for an amount of energy equivalent to the annual electricity consumption of 30,000 average Victorian homes – the correct number is 3,000 homes.