A major new wind and storage project proposed for central New South Wales has joined the queue for approval from both the federal and state governments, with plans to install up to 76 turbines and with the option for each of those turbines to have batteries included.
Goldwind Australia has lodged applications to develop the up 600 megawatt (MW) Milpulling Wind Farm around 40km north-west of Dubbo, in the Gilgandra Shire Council on land where the turbines and batteries would co-exist with cattle and sheep grazing and cropping.
The wind farm would include battery storage of up 250 MW with five hours’ duration (1000 megawatt-hours) and, according to planning documents, this storage would either be spread across the project – “DC-coupled” to the turbines – or installed the traditional way at the connection asset (AC-coupled).
As Renew Economy has reported, Goldwind has successfully piloted this hybrid wind and battery approach on the National Electricity Market by retrofitting one of the roughly 3 MW turbines at its 312 MW Moorabool wind farm in central western Victoria with a 2 MW/4.8 MWh GoldBlock BESS.
Off that back of that trial, the wind giant recently applied to modify the design of its 75-turbine, 298 megawatt (MW) Coppabella wind farm, also in NSW, to include co-located battery energy storage systems (BESS) at 53 turbine locations.
