Last year, in 2019, the McElligotts Tasmanian team were involved in a large wind turbine project for the new Cattle Hill Wind Farm in partnership with Haywards.
Cattle Hill Wind Farm is Tasmania’s third wind farm (with their fourth currently close to completion) and is located on the shores of Lake Echo in the Central Plateau of Tasmania. The farm consists of 48 turbines which produce 148 MW of clean renewable energy – that’s enough to power about 63,500 Tasmanian homes! It is also the first wind farm in Australia to trial innovative eagle monitoring and detection technology, designed to help conserve Australia’s native bird populations.
McElligotts worked closely on this project in partnership with Haywards who were responsible for manufacturing 20% of the tower components, and our Tasmanian team supported them in providing all of the protective coating systems. The biggest challenge in this project was the scope – each piece was very large and moving them through the workshop was a process that needed to be managed carefully. Each piece of the turbine was oversized, and multiple roads had to be closed when transporting them to Cattle Hill Wind Farm.
Renewable energy in Australia is a growing sector with wind energy a leading component of that. Wind power currently accounts for approximately 8.5% of Australia’s total energy demand, and about 35% of all renewable energy production within the country. There are currently 101 wind farms throughout Australia with another 30 projects either under construction or committed to being built in the next 24 months. So this is a growing sector that McElligotts are excited to be involved in and contributing to.
Cattle Hill Wind Farm is not the first wind farm that McElligotts have provided protective coatings services for and is likely to be the last. With a strong focus on renewable energy, especially coming out of the devastating bushfires in late 2019 / early 2020, we can see many more wind tower projects coming in the future. Our Tasmanian facilities are well equipped to handle this work, with a very close relationship with Haywards who manufacture a lot of the wind towers within Australia.
Our Tasmanian facilities are located next to Haywards and we share some facilities including cranes and a trolley rail system that enables us to move the wind towers and other heavy structures around. For example, currently with wind towers, we can have 3 or 4 sections of the tower in our facility undercover at one time. The trolley system then pushes the structures through the line, from blasting bays and then into painting bays. Learn more about our Tasmanian facilities and capabilities here.