Gouda Wind Farm is a
wind farm
A wind farm or wind park, also called a wind power station or wind power plant, is a group of wind turbines in the same location used to produce electricity. Wind farms vary in size from a small number of turbines to several hundred wind turb ...
just outside the town of
Gouda in the
Western Cape
The Western Cape is a province of South Africa, situated on the south-western coast of the country. It is the fourth largest of the nine provinces with an area of , and the third most populous, with an estimated 7 million inhabitants in 2020 ...
province of
South Africa
South Africa, officially the Republic of South Africa (RSA), is the Southern Africa, southernmost country in Africa. It is bounded to the south by of coastline that stretch along the Atlantic Ocean, South Atlantic and Indian Oceans; to the ...
that at 138MW is one of the largest wind-farms in
Southern Africa
Southern Africa is the southernmost subregion of the African continent, south of the Congo and Tanzania. The physical location is the large part of Africa to the south of the extensive Congo River basin. Southern Africa is home to a number o ...
. The project cost R2.7 billion (US$199 million)
and was brought online in early September 2015. At the time of its completion it was the largest wind-farm in the Western Cape. It is capable of powering 200 000 households per year or 400 gigawatt hours of electricity.
It is estimated that power generated from Gouda Wind Farm will avoid the emission of 406 million metric tons of per year of equivalent power produced from a coal fired power plant.
It is owned in partnership between the South African renewable energy and engineering firm
Aveng and Spanish renewable energy company
Acciona Energia.
It is located along the
R44 34 km from the town of
Porterville or 115 km north east of Cape Town, just outside of
Gouda.
Design
The wind farm is unusual in that it was the first wind-farm in South Africa to have concrete towers instead of the more usual steel towers. It was decided to use concrete as they could be produced domestically unlike steel towers which needed to be imported.
Each of the turbines three blades are 50 meters in length with the pitch of the blades designed to maintain rotation speed as wind speed drops by increasing; they are designed to shut down if wind speeds exceed 70 km/h. They are mounted on 100m high concrete towers. The turbines are required to be designed so as not to exceed 35
decibels of sound.
See also
*
List of wind farms in South Africa
References
{{Power in South Africa , state=expanded
Buildings and structures in the Western Cape
Economy of the Western Cape
Wind farms in South Africa