Mt Mercer Wind Farm

Concern for the planet’s declining resources has led several of our clients to invest in renewable energy. We are helping them make this happen.

Renewable energy is a hot topic worldwide. As demand for electricity continues to soar, traditional sources for power generation have lost favour to renewables. Most people embrace alternatives that give them the ‘feel-good' factor, while governments seek long-term energy security that finite fossil fuels like oil and gas can't offer.

As Australia continues to progress its sustainable energy transition, with a target of net-zero emissions by the year 2025, wind power is emerging as one of the country's most prevalent and efficient renewable energy sources. Wind energy provided 12% of Australia's total power generation in 2023, second only to solar power at 16%.

With those numbers set to increase significantly in the coming years, wind farms in Australia are on the rise. There are currently around 90 wind farms operating within Australia. Around another 200 are planned or under construction, including offshore wind farm projects.

Mt Mercer Wind Farm

Beca provided engineering and consulting expertise on one of many wind projects contributing to achieving the Australian Renewable Energy Target (RET) of 33,000GWh by 2020.

Mt Mercer Wind Farm is located over a 2,600 hectare site south of Ballarat, Victoria. 64 wind turbines, each rated at 2.05MW, give a total wind farm capacity of 131.2MW. What that equates to is enough electricity to power the city of Ballarat or 80,000 homes. It also means that Victoria will eliminate almost 500,000 tonnes per year of carbon emissions from fossil fuel generators, which is good for the government and our conscience too.

We've got experienced power engineers both sides of the Tasman, and helped to build New Zealand's largest wind farm, so we're ideally placed to provide engineering support on this exciting project. Power generation systems are complex, so our expertise was valuable in offering independent advice and solving the long list of technical and compliance challenges such a project entails, and in getting the wind farm connected to the Victorian transmission system.

Now a fixture on the Victorian skyline, Mt Mercer Wind Farm is proof that wind really can help to save our planet.
 

Other Big Wind Energy Projects in Australia

• Golden Plains Wind Farm (Victoria) – Australia's largest wind farm and the largest in the Southern Hemisphere. It began construction in 2023 and, once fully operational, its 1,330MW capacity will be enough to power more than 765,000 homes.

• MacIntyre Wind Farm (Queensland) – The largest wind farm in QLD, with a capacity of 923 MW and capacity to meet the electricity needs of approximately 700,000 homes.

• Rye Park Wind Farm (New South Wales) – So far the largest in the state of NSW, Rye Park has a generating capacity of 396MW, sufficient to provide clean energy to more than 215,000 homes.