Huxley Hill Wind Farm (also known as the King Island Wind Farm) is a

wind power Wind power is the use of wind energy to generate useful work. Historically, wind power was used by sails, windmills and windpumps, but today it is mostly used to generate electricity. This article deals only with wind power for electricity ge ...

station at

King Island, Tasmania King Island is an island in Bass Strait, belonging to the Australian state of Tasmania. It is the largest of four islands known as the New Year Group and the second-largest island in Bass Strait (after Flinders Island). The island's population ...

, Australia, of around 1,600 residents, owned by

Hydro Tasmania Hydro Tasmania, formerly the Hydro-Electric Commission (HEC), is a Tasmanian Government business enterprise which is the main electricity generator in Tasmania, Australia. Originally oriented towards hydro-electricity, owing to Tasmania's dr ...

, which supplements the four diesel generators with a combined capacity of 6 MW at Currie Power Station. King Island also has a 100 kW solar capacity provided with monocrystaline solar panels on dual-axis arrays. The wind farm started generating in 1998, initially with three 250 kW

Nordex Nordex SE is a European company that designs, sells and manufactures wind turbines, founded in 1985 and headquartered in the German city of Rostock with production in Germany, Brazil, India, Mexico, Poland and Spain. According to the company, it ...

N29

wind turbine A wind turbine is a device that wind power, converts the kinetic energy of wind into electrical energy. , hundreds of thousands of list of most powerful wind turbines, large turbines, in installations known as wind farms, were generating over ...

s at a cost of $2.5 M ($3,300/kW), then in 2003 with two 850 kW Vestas Turbines, to provide a total wind generating capacity of 2.5 MW of

electricity Electricity is the set of physical phenomena associated with the presence and motion of matter possessing an electric charge. Electricity is related to magnetism, both being part of the phenomenon of electromagnetism, as described by Maxwel ...

. Wind generation provides around 35% of the annual generation. As a declared Community Service Obligation, the Tasmanian Government provides around $7 million per annum in funding support for the electricity supply equivalent to around $2,500 per resident per annum.

Flow battery storage

During the 2003 expansion a vanadium redox flow battery was installed at a cost of $4M (or $20,000 per kW), containing 55,000 litres of

vanadium Vanadium is a chemical element; it has Symbol (chemistry), symbol V and atomic number 23. It is a hard, silvery-grey, malleable transition metal. The elemental metal is rarely found in nature, but once isolated artificially, the formation of an ...

based electrolyte—one of the first such installations on a

wind farm A wind farm, also called a wind park 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 turbines covering an exten ...

. This allowed up to 800

kWh A kilowatt-hour (unit symbol: kW⋅h or kW h; commonly written as kWh) is a non-SI unit of energy equal to 3.6 megajoules (MJ) in SI units, which is the energy delivered by one kilowatt of power for one hour. Kilowatt-hours are a common b ...

of surplus electricity to be stored. The battery has an output power of 200 kW, making up around 3% of total capacity, and could be used to smooth the substantial variability in wind output over minutes to hours. When used in conjunction with a variable resistive load, a higher wind penetration is possible, permitting the substantial second to second variability to be controlled with the resistor, reducing the need to spill excess wind through throttling of the turbines. A short-term peak output of 400 kW can be supplied. As a result, there has been a substantial reduction in the use of diesel fuel, however the full diesel capacity must be maintained, including the need to maintain spinning reserve for system security. However, the system proved to be not robust enough and failed after a relatively short life. It has been replaced with a 1.6 MWh "advanced lead acid technology" battery.King Island Renewable Energy Integration Project
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References

{{Authority control Energy infrastructure completed in 1998 King Island (Tasmania) Wind farms in Tasmania 1998 establishments in Australia