Australian coal plant uses more land than wind energy

While wind turbines get spread out over a wide area, apart from the bases of the wind turbines and the roads built to service them, almost all the land is still available for its original purpose which is normally either grazing or cropping.

In Australia wind farms only remove about 1% of their total land area from use.

And this is a figure that will get even smaller as the average size of wind turbines increases.

A site that uses two megawatt turbines might only remove 0.67% of land from use.

And even that small amount of land is not a complete loss, as agriculture benefits from reduced wind speeds and the service roads can be used by farmers.

Wind farms vary a lot in the total area they cover due to local wind conditions and topography.

The Bald Hills Wind Farm, which is under construction on grazing land in Victoria, will have 52 turbines over 1,750 hectares, have a total capacity of 104 megawatts, and is expected to operate at over 36% of capacity.

Using the 1% figure for land removed from grazing, which may be too high as its 2 megawatt turbines are large for Australia, it will produce an average of 218 watts per square meter, which isn