“This has to change:” Flurry of late orders breaks wind drought and gives global turbine giants hope for 2026

Global wind turbine manufacturing giant Vestas has rescued a drought-ridden 2025 with a flurry of late orders in Australia, and says it is looking forward for more in the coming year as the wind industry shows signs of a rebound.

Vestas last week broke a 358-day turbine order drought in Australia with the signing of a 108 megawatt contract for the Waddi wind project in Western Australia, and on Tuesday it was announced that it had also landed a contract for the 205 MW Delburn wind project in Victoria.

The owner of Waddi, Tilt Renewables, is also expected to reach financial close on the 288 MW Palmer wind project in South Australia, possibly before the end of the year if the lawyers can finalise the deal. Vestas is expected to be confirmed as the turbine supplier for that project.

Jan Daniel Kaemmer, the head of sales for Vestas in Australia and New Zealand, heralded the signing of the new contracts in a post on LinkedIn on Monday, before the confirmation of the Delburn deal.

“But 358 days is way too long,” he wrote. Almost a lost year for the energy transition in Australia. A whole industry working hard. Only to get a few projects off the ground.

“This. Has. To. Change. And it will. I am sure, in 2026 we will see the Ketchup effect, suddenly a lot will move – and it will be messy.”

Wind was expected to provide the bulk of new capacity needed to meet Australia’s 82 per cent renewable energy target by 2030, but the stubbornly high price of turbines, combined with planning and social licence issues and high civil construction costs, has seen investment stall in the past year.

In its place, stand alone battery projects and solar-battery hybrid projects have taken precedence, with more than two dozen either in commissioning, under construction or finalising contracts after receiving approval for federal and state underwriting deals.

But the flurry of projects build hopes of a rebound. Waddi (108 MW), Delburn (205 MW) and Aula Energy’s Carmody’s Hill project (256 MW), which reached financial close last week, make some 580 MW of confirmed wind projects that will start construction early in 2026.

Add to that the 288 MW Palmer wind project, expected to reach FiD in coming days, and Goldwind’s 288 MW Coppabella project, also considered close to FiD, and that takes the total of new projects to more than 1.1 gigawatts and more than $4 billion in new investment.

Australia, of course, needs a lot more than that – at least 3 GW and up to 5 GW of new wind a year by most counts, in addition to the solar and battery storage that will be added, along with behind the meter installations.

“We do see a large pipeline of projects coming through in 2026 and 2027,” Danny Nielsen, the country head for Vestas in Australia, told Renew Economy in an interview last week.

Nielsen points to the fall in the global oil price, and the resulting reduction in transport costs – crucial for the delivery of large towers and turbine blades to Australian projects – as a sign that wind costs in Australia are reducing.

But there are still capacity constraints in the civil construction industry, which means costs in that sector remain high. Transformer costs and other electrical balance of plant requirements are also high. “A lot of those prices have stayed high,” he says.

Nielsen say Australia is being helped by consistent policy, and by the rollout, albeit delayed, of key transmission projects, and key changes to the EPBC, the federal environmental act.

“We see an urge to get the transition happening. It is too late not to …. build out to transmission lines. It is a critical part of the transition,” Nielsen says.

He also noted the choice of turbines for the Waddi and other projects, where a 6 MW model already widely deployed in Australian grids has been chosen. Nielsen says the familiarity for the critical grid connection process is also important.

This was a theme picked up Gilan Sabatier, the chief commercial officer for GE Vernova’s onshore wind business in international markets, after that company secured its order for its 6.2 MW turbines for the Carmody’s Hill project.

“Carmody’s Hill Wind Farm demonstrates how our workhorse strategy – deploying fewer turbine variants at scale- can help streamline contracting, accelerate grid approvals, and enhance quality and reliability across the fleet,” he said in a statement.

See also Renew Economy’s Large Scale Wind Farm Map of Australia for more information. And listen to a recent Energy Insiders podcast interview with Jan Daniel Kaemmer here: Energy Insiders Podcast: The future of wind energy

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