JUN 10

I don't think that Conergy is Germany's largest ENERGY company.

"Germany's largest energy company Conergy"

Power at a cost of $2 per install watt, a great price.

Sounds like the Aussies have their priorities straight. While the US is spendingbillions on "clear the car lot" legislation so consumers can be subsidized to buy more fossil-fuel inefficient cars, Australians are spending billions on clean energy. The answer is blowing in the wind!

This is good to hear - I'm hoping to hear about more wind farms being built in the near future!

It is not such a great idea to take up more living space for wind farms. It's true I don't know how much of this farm was actually "living space" before hand. Still, powering only 430,000 homes with 80,000 acres of windmills is a waste of the land and our money because there are more efficient technologies, like solar and nuclear power, which will have a much greater impact on reducing our carbon footprint in the future without sacrificing already scarce living space in the present. If the wind farm idea is say brought to China and the U.S., much more densely inhabited than Australia, the efficiency for the amount of space is not worth it. You would be destroying wild life and forests to make these wind farms, and the land would be taken forever because the land must be completely cleared. There are very few places where you can build these things - areas with strong winds that blow virtually always in the same direction - this doesn't apply to many places around the world. We should spend 2 billion dollars on more efficient and more widely applicable technologies that are closer to solving the problem.

China, USA, Australia all have large swathes of deserts, usable for either solar or wind electricity-generation (and not much else besides.) For countries that do not have deserts/tundras, many have off-shore areas that are ideal for wind-farms.

In this case the BBC article gives a better approximate regarding where this particular farm is going, and if the studies have shown that there are sufficient winds to exploit, there's no better use for the land than as a wind-farm (yes, it really is in the "outback".)

In addition, the winds do not have to come from one direction, you'd be hard-pressed to find wind-turbines without yawing mechanism.

Very approximate area for the wind-farm:http://tr.im/pR5w

P.S. EcoGeek, your 'spam-filter' sucks.

Australia is making great improvements