West is best for wind farm performance as renewables blow away gas market share

Western Australia and South Australia have kicked off the new year by dominating the nation’s top wind farm performance rankings, the two states between them occupying the entire top 10 list, according to the January data from Rystad Energy.

This is particularly good news for WA, has been hit by a series of problems from its traditional fossil fuel generation – problems that continue to take a toll in 2023.

Heading up the list of top utility wind assets put together by Rystad’s David Dixon each month is the Ratch-Australia/Alinta Energy Yandin wind farm (214MW) with a capacity factor of averaging 54.1% for January.

The Yandin project, featuring 51 Vestas turbines near the town of Dandaragan, north of Perth, was pitched early on in its development as having access to some of Australia’s best wind resources. This appears to have held up.

WA holds spots two, three and four on the list, too, and all four facilities had capacity factors of more than 50 per centL APA Group’s Badgingarra wind farm (53.8% CF); Iberdrola Australia’s Walkaway wind farm (51.1% CF) and; Mumbida, a 55MW project owned by Synergy and Ifrastructure Capital Group.

“Also noteworthy,” says Dixon, is South Australia’s top performing wind asset, the wind component of the Port Augusta Renewable Energy, which notched up a capacity factor of 47.9% in January, taking up spot 5 on the list.

This is augurs well for the project owned by Iberdrola, which also happens to be the largest operational hybrid wind and solar project in Australia, for now.

The combined output of large scale wind and the second best month on record for large scale solar (see yesterday’s story), meant that gas generation was relegated to a January low of just 1.3 terrawatt hours, less than one third that of large scale wind and solar (3.9TWh).

“Gas generation has seen substantial declines in all states except Western Australia,” Dixon noted. W.A. is the exception because coal has been dramatically reduced due to the inability to find enough to throw into the state’s boilers.