Two massive offshore wind farms proposed for Bass Strait
Giles Parkinson 11 June 2021
Two new massive offshore wind farms have been proposed for either side of Bass Strait, taking the growing pipeline of projects in a technology that has yet to be deployed in Australia to more than 25 gigawatts.
An Australian based company, Brookvale Energy, is looking at an offshore wind project in Tasmanian waters of up to 2,000MW or more, while the Scotland-based Flotation Energy is looking at a 1,500MW project off Ninety Mile beach in Victoria’s Gippsland region, but possibly using floating wind turbines.
Both projects are in their early stages, and were discovered in RenewEconomy’s research for its newly launched Offshore Wind Map of Australia, the latest in a series of map-based resources for clean energy projects across the country.
There are now at least 12 different offshore wind proposals in Australia, with the most advanced being the 2,000MW Star of the South project off Gippsland in Victoria, which is going through environmental assessments and has mapped out a path for underground transmission to plug into the infrastructure in the Latrobe Valley.
All of the projects are looking to fill the gap that will be left by the impending closure of Australia’s ageing fleet of coal generators, and to seize the opportunities presented by the shift to green hydrogen.
Both of those opportunities will crystallise in the next decade, as the coal generators exit and hydrogen technology matures, which might time nicely with the long development times of these projects.
There are now some $100 billion of offshore wind projects under construction or development around the world and generation costs have come down considerably. Offshore wind farms also have higher capacity factors and often generate at different times to onshore facilities.
