Wind farm and big battery planned for coal seam gas hub seeks federal green tick

Plans to develop a 400MW wind farm and big battery in Queensland’s Maranoa region has joined the queue for federal environmental assessment, as it seeks the green tick to go ahead on agricultural land pock marked with gas wells.

WestWind Energy’s up to 50 turbine Bottle Tree Energy Park won Queensland state planning approval in December last year for construction 16 km northeast of Roma – one of the Sunshine State’s coal seam gas hubs.

The wind and battery project now will be assessed under the federal Environment Protection and Biodiversity (EPBC) Act for any threat to protected flora including Poplar Box grassy woodland on alluvial plains, semi-evergreen vine thickets of the Brigalow Belt and Nandewar bioregions, and a small area of Weeping Myall woodlands.

Threatened fauna species in the area have been identified as koalas.

Roma became the hottest ticket in property between 2011 and 2014 during when workers flooded the area to exploit the CSG resource. But its history in fossil energy extraction does not necessarily improve the chances of the proposed clean energy project. 

On a site just to the east of Roma, in the Western Downs region, environment minister Tanya Plibersek rejected a 100MW solar farm in May because of the impact on “water sources, woodland vegetation and wildlife, including koalas”.

The project was to be built on a 400 hectare site featuring remnant and regrowth woody vegetation, most of which would need to be cleared. The site was in the middle of the Surat basin of coal seam gas fields and next door to a huge fossil gas production facility owned by Shell QGC.

The developer of the scrapped Kumbarilla renewable energy park, proposed by Elecseed, a Korean-Australian company, and Komipo, a Korean government owned power company, was “surrounded by hundreds of gas wells”, they said.  

WestWind has managed to usher much bigger projects successfully through the EPBC process, however, including the 1.333 GW Golden Plains wind farm in Victoria, which is currently the largest under development in Australia.

While most of the WestWind’s projects have been developed in Victoria, to date, it has more recently turned its focus to Queensland, unveiling just this week a plan to develop a massive 1.5GW wind farm in the state’s north.

The developer has revealed it is preparing planning and environmental applications for the Cameron Downs Energy Park, proposed for south of Hughenden in Queensland’s Flinders Shire.

The early stage plan for the project is to install up to 200 turbines, with a height of 280 metres from ground to tip, on a site area of around 32,000 hectares.