Wind farm at Stanley
Building a wind farm on the hills overlooking Australia’s most charming historical towns is madness, say the residents of Stanley ... I’m inclined to agree.
near the Tully Falls National Park, Epuron’s Chalumbin wind farm will install 95 wind turbines to produce 570MW of electricity. That’s 100MW more than the output of Tasmania’s Gordon dam which flooded Lake Pedder.
Suddenly across Australia and around the world there is a Wind Rush.
Trillions of dollars in government incentives and tax relief are being poured into renewable energy projects to allow nations to reach reduced carbon emission targets by 2050 and limit global warming to 1.5 degrees.
Of course, some so called ‘climate deniers’ call it ‘greenwash’.
It has been alleged that some companies like Epuron are only there for a quick profit and not to save the planet. They develop wind farms and then on sell them.
This month the investment bank Lazard was hired to sell Epuron itself. A spokesperson for Epuron told me that the company was “exploring potential investment to support its next wave of projects. This does not affect the progress of current projects.”
Clearly, now is a good time for any renewable energy company to make hay while the sun shines and the wind blows.
With global temperatures rising, most OECD countries have decided that at least part of the answer is blowing in the wind. Which can be bad news if you live leaning into it in a place like Stanley where the westerlies are so strong, it is said, if the wind ever dropped, everyone would fall flat on their faces.
“Stanley’s a tourism town now and in the last decade house prices have doubled and doubled again and then some,” Sam Humphries told me at the bar of his fabulous Angels’ Share wine and whisky store in a grand old bank building in Church Street.
Sam, who is the son of a local fisherman and boatbuilder told me, “In the old days we used to say, ‘Stanley is a drinking town with a fishing problem’. But now it’s much more cosmopolitan. We’ve still got the fish but now it’s wine with your lobster and Tasmanian whisky to finish.”
Sam left town for a couple of decades and lived the high life of a sound recordist travelling the world, sometimes on the road with me. He developed some expensive tastes which might explain the classy whisky bar. Stanley today, just like Sam himself, is much more savvy than it was back when he left home to see the world.
“The place is heaps more sophisticated. Twenty years ago, they would have gotten away with the wind farm but now we’ve all become activists for our town and our lifestyle.
It won’t happen without a hell of a fight,” Sam