First turbine blade arrives at Queensland’s Dulacca wind farm

There are more welcome signs of renewable energy progress in Queensland this week, with the first massive Vestas wind turbine blade arriving by truck to the site of the 180MW Dulacca wind farm in the state’s south west.

The Dulacca wind farm is being developed by RES Australia and Vestas across six different grazing and cropping properties between Miles and Roma, and near the Columboola solar farm.

A video posted on LinkedIn by Vestas engineer Heydar Ebrahimi, shows the first of the project’s turbine blades snaking its way to the construction site, about 350km north west of Brisbane.

Dulacca is one of a growing number of Australian renewables projects now owned by UK-based renewables giant Octopus, and has a long term off-take deal with Queensland government-owned utility, CleanCo.

As RenewEconomy reported here, that deal – in which CleanCo committed to take 70 per cent, or 126MW, of the power produced by Dulacca – helped it become one of the very few large-scale wind or solar projects to land finance in Australia in 2021.

“These type of projects – with a quality team like RES, Vestas (the turbine supplier) and a government PPA (power purchase agreement) are few and far between,” Sam Reynolds, the head of Octopus Australia, told RenewEconomy in August of last year.

“We think that Queensland wind is a valuable proposition because of its inverse relationship to rooftop solar, and we want to have a mix of wind, solar and storage. That’s the best way to play renewables in Australia.”