Wind power in south-west Victoria is only a fraction of future growth

But new research from the Australian National University suggests the hundreds of turbines across the region represent a fraction of what's to come.

Professor Andrew Blakers led a team to produce heat maps showing the ideal areas for wind and solar generation across Australia, and south-west Victoria was the key area that lit up bright red.

"If you have a look at our map you can see that in western Victoria and south-east South Australia there is just awesome possibilities for more wind power," Professor Blakers said.

The researchers plugged in three vital pieces of data to calculate the best renewable energy hot spots: natural "solar resource", "wind resource", and distance from high-power transmission lines.

"The solar and wind resources are obvious in terms of why you need that, but the distance to high power transmission is slightly less obvious," Professor Blakers said. "We have to get the solar and wind power into the cities like Sydney and Melbourne and it's difficult and slow to build new high power transmission, so proximity to existing transmission is highly desirable."

In order to get the power from a wind farm to a high-power transmission line you have to build lower power feeder lines, but they are expensive.

"After a while the cost of getting the power into the high voltage transmission line overrides the benefit of the abundant solar or wind resources in a particular location," Professor Blakers said.

"So you don't really have any solar or wind farms in central Australia because they're just too damn far away. You're really confined to where the high power transmission is or where there's a transmission line approved to be built."

The south-west is naturally blessed in both respects, with natural wind resource and high-power transmission connecting Portland to Melbourne.

The region's wind power potential is a combination of climate and geography.

"So in hilly country the wind resource can vary a lot. In western Victoria where it's pretty flat the exact location of each wind turbine doesn't matter very much," Professor Blakers said. "Then from Warrnambool you've got pretty much uninterrupted wind coming all the way from South America, so its a very good place to do wind energy."

The ANU team produced heat maps for three different wind power scenarios: low, medium, and high cost. Professor Blakers said the different scenarios showed whether it worth building large, medium or small wind farms.

"With these projects, scale matters. If you're building a 50 megawatt wind farm and someone else is building a 500MW wind farm then the bigger one will be cheaper per unit," he said. "We can't predict what kind of wind farm people are going to build, so we offered three scenarios."

Professor Blakers said he and his colleagues had produced the heat maps to empower farmers, who could potentially be big winners in the transition to net zero.

"The solar and wind farm companies already know all of this information because it's their business," he said.

"But now individual farmers or communities or local governments can go to our maps and see whether they're in a no-hoper region (blue) or a prime region (red), and then talk to their neighbours and say 'why don't we put together a consortium of half a dozen farms and approach a solar or wind farm company to negotiate a good price?'"

"It's about making all that information available to a person who really doesn't know how good their wind and solar is and doesn't know how important it is to be near transmission."

He said informing the general public would also smooth the process for wind farm developers, who often had to spend huge amounts of time and money finding enough neighbouring landholders eager to accept turbines on their properties.

"The other very important constituent who might look at this data is local governments. They can look and see their area is red, so they've got great wind, and decide 'what are we going to do with it?'" Professor Blakers said.

He said there was huge scope for local governments to "act as midwife", bringing together landowners and developers and leveraging a better deal for the local community in the subsequent negotiations.

"The developers have learned the lesson that anyone who rides roughshod over the local community tends to come to grief, and those who get right into social acceptance from day nought are the ones who succeed in winning over most of the community," he said.

He said there was no sense in local councils tilting at windmills when the transition to clean energy made further wind development a foregone conclusion.

"Australia currently has about 10 per cent of the solar and wind farms that it will need to get to zero emissions, so if you think you've got a lot now, think again," Professor Blakers said.

He said of that remaining 90 per cent , one third will be produced from rooftop solar panels, one third will come from solar farms, and one third will be wind power.

"And of the wind farms, at the moment all of them are onshore, but in the future a quarter or a third might be offshore," he said.

But of the three quarters that were onshore, Victoria would host a disproportionate share for its size.

"Victoria is the wind farm capital of Australia. It's got great wind all along the southern coast running from Melbourne all the way to South Australia" Professor Blakers said. "Solar and wind farms will go into these areas as fast as new transmission is built."

He said areas closer to Melbourne like Ballarat also had great wind resource, but were limited by their transmission capability.

"The transmission around that area is not necessarily all that strong, so there would be limits on how much wind you could stuff into the Ballarat district."

He said farmers demanding that a high-power transmission line through the district be buried would change their tune if they were properly remunerated.

"In NSW it used to be that people who host high power transmission got about one fifth of the compensation payments compared to the people hosting the wind turbines. But the NSW government has just made a decision to basically equalise it and it's only a matter of time before the other states do the same," he said.

"I think you'll find that people start to compete for the privilege of hosting the high power transmission because it drought proofs their farm."

Professor Blakers said he didn't understand people campaigning against wind farms.

"I would love to host turbines if I was a farmer. $20,000 per year per turbine, wow, free money. So it's a noisy minority who are basically telling their neighbours 'I don't want you to earn money'," he said.

"They ought to move to Yallourn and live next to a brown coal power station. See how they like that."