Australia’s Wind Turbines
More than 4,700 wind turbines now turn in Australia, the tallest of them nearly twice the height of the Harbour Bridge arch, and the minister’s 2022 arithmetic for 2030 called for forty more every month.
The Scale
| Turning now | More than 4,700 turbines, about 90 sites, 15,381 megawatts. Victoria 1,655 turbines, South Australia 969, New South Wales 880, Queensland 601, Western Australia 430, Tasmania 202. |
|---|---|
| What they generated | 38.4 terawatt-hours in 2025, 2.7 Erarings, 15.7 percent of the country’s electricity. Averaged over the year, the fleet ran at about 30 percent of its rated power. |
| How big | The tallest operating, at Wambo in Queensland, stand 247 metres to the blade tip. The Harbour Bridge arch is 134 metres; Sydney Tower is 309. A turbine of the kind at Golden Plains carries three 79-metre blades on an 80-tonne nacelle atop a tower of about 500 tonnes of steel, set in a concrete foundation about 20 metres across and 3 metres deep. |
| How much land | A consent for 141 turbines now before the NSW planning commission covers a project area of 20,629 hectares, 146 hectares a turbine, of which 656 hectares, 4.7 a turbine, would be cleared or built on. Scaled to the national fleet, which is project areas of the order of 7,000 square kilometres, three and a half Port Phillip Bays, with about 220 square kilometres actually disturbed (estimate). The rest stays in crops or grazing. |
| Being built | Ten wind farms, 420 turbines, 2,431 megawatts. The Clean Energy Council’s wider count of wind financed or under construction at the end of 2025 was 18 projects and 5,398 megawatts. |
| Consented or proposed | 3,350 turbines, 43,452 megawatts, almost every number a maximum in a consent. The biggest, Warracknabeal in Victoria, cleared its environmental assessment on 16 May 2026 for up to 219 turbines standing 280 metres, on about 26,000 hectares. |
| The rate required | The minister in September 2022: “about forty 7-megawatt wind turbines every month until 2030”. At that rate Australia would add about 4,000 turbines by the end of 2030, nearly doubling the fleet. In 2025 it installed 1,323 megawatts, about 220 turbines of today’s size, or 18 a month (estimate). |
What Exists Now
Victoria carries the most wind installations, 35. South Australia has 23, New South Wales 20, Western Australia 13, Queensland 10 and Tasmania 6. The largest wind installation fully commissioned at the end of 2025 was Stockyard Hill in Victoria, 149 turbines and 530 megawatts. MacIntyre in southern Queensland, 162 turbines and 923 megawatts across 32,000 hectares, was still commissioning in August 2026 after a blade failure, held at about half output while blades are replaced. Golden Plains in Victoria, 215 turbines at 230 metres across 16,723 hectares, has its first stage of 122 turbines operating and its second under construction; at $3 billion it works out at about $14 million a turbine. MacIntyre’s $1.96 billion works out at about $12 million each.
What Is Coming
Golden Plains West adds 93 turbines and 577 megawatts. Uungula, in the Central West Orana zone, is building 69 of a consented 97. Palmer in South Australia is building 53. Lotus Creek, Wambo Stage 2 and Boulder Creek in Queensland add 125 between them. Only 857 megawatts of new wind reached financial close in 2025, down 59 percent on 2024 and the first year in which no wind project closed finance before the December quarter.
What Remains Proposed
Almost every turbine number in the pipeline is a ceiling. Forest Wind in Queensland is consented for up to 226. Warracknabeal for up to 219. Yanco Delta in New South Wales for up to 208 at 270 metres. Bungaban in Queensland for up to 200. Goyder North in South Australia for up to 135. Liverpool Range, above Coolah, for up to 185 at 215 metres, cut from 267 after consultation. Bullawah, at 300 metres, goes to a public hearing on 1 September 2026. Consents are routinely built out below their ceiling: Uungula is building 69 of 97; Valley of the Winds was lodged at 176 and consented at 131. Projects have also been refused: Chalumbin in far north Queensland, renamed Wooroora, was cut to 42 turbines and then refused by the Commonwealth Environment Minister, Tanya Plibersek, on 19 April 2024.
Reading the Numbers
Capacity and turbine numbers are different quantities: newer machines carry more megawatts each, so the fleet’s 4,700 turbines average 3.2 megawatts while new ones are 6 or 7. Three counts are kept apart and never added: turbines turning, turbines being built, and turbines in consents. The third is a ceiling. The land figures are estimates scaled from one NSW assessment report; proponents publish site boundaries and regulators publish disturbance, and the two differ thirty-fold.
Technical material prepared for To Save a Beach and removed from the manuscript for length. Figures are as at August 2026. Where a figure is an estimate, the assumption is stated.
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