Golden Plains wind farm: Bits of turbine blades go flying

Pieces of wind turbine from one of Australia’s largest wind farm projects have been blown onto a neighbouring farm and roads.

Bits of serrated turbine blade edging, from the newly built Golden Plains wind farm, have been blown onto a neighbouring farm and roads just 45km west of Geelong.

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”.

A WorkSafe spokesman said it was “monitoring the site to ensure health and safety obligations are being met”.

A smaller piece of turbine blade on the road.

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.

One of the serrated segments that Russell Coad found on his farm, showing the adhesive strip used to glue it onto the turbine blade.

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.

Originally published as Golden Plains wind farm: Bits of turbine blades go flying