26-05-2025
Denmark's co-op wind farm to double output as energy projects gather steam
Atop a windy headland on the picturesque south coast of Western Australia is one of the country's first community-owned renewable energy projects.
Compared to the mega-farms proposed elsewhere in regional Australia, the Denmark Community Windfarm (DCW) is a minnow.
The twin 800-kilowatt turbines, both 55 metres tall, produce about 40 per cent of the town's total energy needs.
It is a fraction of the energy produced by commercial development, but for the last 12 years the modest facility has returned financial and environmental dividends.
DCW director Paul Llewellyn said there was a plan to expand the operation amid population growth in the area.
"We have approval for four turbines," he said.
"We can keep the two running and put two additional turbines up, or we could increase the size of those two.
"Batteries added to that [would] make it an even more integrated system.
Mr Llewellyn said the energy sold to WA's state-owned electricity provider Synergy reduced the electricity bills of the 160 community shareholders by about 10 per cent.
Plans to connect batteries to increase the community's load capacity were in the works, but a cap on government funding meant the plan was put on hold.
"We've investigated and made an application for support to get five large batch-scale batteries embedded into the local network," he said.
"We should have got support, that was a perfect project to do regional-scale storage and integration of electricity and batteries into the network."
Mr Llewellyn said as Australia moved towards the goal of net zero, governments should have a mandate to support communities wanting to participate in the energy market.
"It's profitable at the household scale, it's profitable at the community scale, and it's much cheaper for governments to support that than it is to build large-scale architecture, transmission and generation themselves," he said.
A Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water spokesperson said it was considering implementing new residential and community subsidies, but there was no funding for mid-scale community-led projects.
At the state level, a spokesperson for Energy Minister Amber-Jade Sanderson said the government had established specific agencies to develop government-backed energy projects.
They said the state government also supported community projects through its Clean Energy Future Fund and the regional-specific Traditional Owner Participation Support Fund in the Pilbara.
The DCW is one of hundreds of "mid-level" energy projects across Australia being developed as part of a growing trend for communities to consolidate and participate in the national energy market.
A similar project, the 4.1-megawatt Hepburn wind farm was built at Leonard's Hill in Victoria in 2011, while a 2,400-megawatt community-owned solar farm in Goulburn New South Wales was under development.
Community Power Agency director Jarra Hicks said communities across Australia were increasingly looking to enter the energy market.
"There's a lot of interest, and there's even more in the pipeline."
She said while retail and household generation like rooftop solar had been widely supported, mid-scale developments in between household and commercial projects were less supported.
"There's this gap in the middle, this middle-sized project where community energy groups have a strong role to play and a lot of benefit," she said.
Independent energy analyst Ray Wills said as the proliferation of renewable technologies in the country rose, so too would stability in the grid.
"Adding batteries to the grid will stabilise it to enable our energy security. It'll do a whole pile of things, that's what distributing energy is meant to do," Professor Willis said.
He said efforts by the WA and federal governments to stabilise the grid, including subsidising the purchase of home batteries, had not given enough attention to regional areas.
"We really should be focused on getting those batteries into the regions," Professor Wills said.
"We don't really need them in the city straight away as much as we need them in the country straight away; every town in WA really should be being enabled."
