Windfarms will already exist at Esperance, Hopetoun, Bremer Bay and Albany.
- At Esperance;
10 Mile Lagoon, 9 x 225kW Vestas machines
9 Mile Beach, 6 x 600kW Enercon E40s
- At Hopetoun and Bremer Bay; 1 x 6ookW Enercon E40 each
- At Albany; 12 x 1800kW Enercon E66s
All these windfarms and the proposed Denmark windfarm are community scaled.
That is, they are roughly proportional to the electrical needs of the towns
they serve and are named after.
Going further west, if there are to be other community windfarms along
this stretch of coast, they will be as small and few as the communities
that are there. Walpole is at that end of the transmission line that
runs west out of the Albany substation and for the number of people
there, maybe one little 150kW (say 25m diameter) machine would be appropriate,
though the economics are against it.
Augusta runs off another line that comes south along the coast between the
Capes. Due to a failed sand mining proposal there is a 132kV transmission
line that runs from the Scott River plains all the way to Collie. Large developers
are considering a large windfarm there, in the order of 80MW.
A look at a map of the south west shows National Parks and Nature Reserves
along the southern coast from Albany to Augusta, and there are very few places
which are not protected by them. The Albany windfarm, Scott River site and
the proposed Denmark site are three such places.
Going east of Esperance, there are no coastal settlements all the way to
the South Australian border some 800 kilometres away.
Incidently, the Quarry site/Ocean Beach Road peninsula or Wilson's Head is
one of over two dozen headlands between the SA border and Augusta, we are
not short of them.
Including the Denmark proposal, these windfarms add up to 30.2MW of rated
output and 33 turbines.
Below, is a map of the south west coast from Denmark to Esperance with a
map of the country of Denmark superimposed. The country of Denmark has over 3000
MW of wind energy and over 5000 turbines.
