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Golden Plains wind farm: Bits of turbine blades go flying 

Credit:  Peter Hunt - September 6, 2024 - The Weekly Times - weeklytimesnow.com.au ~~

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Turbines on Victoria’s largest wind farm development are falling to bits, with pieces of serrated edging falling off its blades and flying across neighbouring farm paddocks and roads.

Russell Coad, whose Barunah farm abutts the massive Golden Plains wind farm project, said he and his son had found dozens of pieces of turbine edging blown onto their property.

A piece of the hard plastic serrated edging off one of the Golden Plains wind turbines that was blown onto a the Coad family’s farm.

“I found some 750m from the turbine,” Mr Coad said. “There were even pieces next to the (Barunah) CFA station, which has a turbine 200m from the shed.”

The Coad family took long-distance photographs of the turbine blades, which clearly show where the serrated edging has detached.

One of the Golden Plains wind farm blades, showing where pieces of serrated edging have been blown off.

A representative of the French-owned Golden Plains Wind Farm said it was “aware of the detached serrated trailing edges (blade serrations) on select turbines that had occurred during last week’s extreme weather event.

“GPWF is working with Vestas and WorkSafe to understand the cause behind this detachment.”

But Wind Farm Living founder Viva-Lyn Lenehan questioned why edging that was designed to improve turbine efficiency and reduce noise had simply blown off wind turbines, which were meant “to cope with a bit of wind”.

It appears the hard plastic serrated sections had been glued onto the turbine blades, with Mr Coad setting up one photograph to show an adhesive band across the base of detached edging that had landed in one of his paddocks.

The French-owned 1333MW development is the largest in the state, dwarfing other projects, with 215 turbines being constructed across 16,739 ha, using 165m rotors.

Work began on the first 122-tubine stage of the project at the beginning of last year, with stage two work commencing in the middle of this year, according to the company’s website.

Foreign-owned wind farm operators are earning up to $200m a year in subsidies in Victoria, which are mostly collected as hidden charges on household bills.

Under the Large-scale Generation Certificate subsidy scheme, the federal government forces electricity retailers to collect enough money from their customers to buy a target number of LGCs from wind, solar and other renewable energy generators each year. The subsidies are paid on top of the revenue each company earns on selling their power on the wholesale market.

Once the Golden Plains project is complete, its French owners are set to gain about $180m a year in LGC subsidies, plus whatever they can earn from actual electricity sales.

Source:  Peter Hunt - September 6, 2024 - The Weekly Times - weeklytimesnow.com.au

This article is the work of the source indicated. Any opinions expressed in it are not necessarily those of National Wind Watch.

The copyright of this article resides with the author or publisher indicated. As part of its noncommercial educational effort to present the environmental, social, scientific, and economic issues of large-scale wind power development to a global audience seeking such information, National Wind Watch endeavors to observe “fair use” as provided for in section 107 of U.S. Copyright Law and similar “fair dealing” provisions of the copyright laws of other nations. Send requests to excerpt, general inquiries, and comments via e-mail.

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