Epuron, a member of the Conergy Group, today received development approval for the Conroy’s Gap Wind Farm from the NSW Planning Minister Frank Sartor.

The 30 megawatt Conroy’s Gap Wind Farm will be located 17 kilometres west of Yass in the Southern Tablelands.In a typical year, the 15 wind turbines will produce enough clean, renewable electricity to match the consumption of more than 11,000 homes.

This is the third NSW wind farm that Epuron has successfully taken through the planning approvals process.

“This is an excellent result for the wind farm, and an excellent result for the people in the Yass region who will benefit not only from jobs and investment in their area, but also from a $25,000 annual fund that Epuron will establish for local community projects.” Executive Director Andrew Durran said.

“Epuron would like to thank the Yass community who have invested time and effort in providing input to this project to maximise the benefits available to the community.”

Along with many areas of NSW, the Yass region is suffering an extended drought which many believe is being made worse by climate change.

Wind farms are good news for the environment, providing clean energy with no greenhouse gas emissions and adding capacity to the NSW power system. Wind power also takes pressure off power stations that are suffering under drought and water shortages, and it brings jobs and investment to rural and regional NSW. Regional centres like Yass and Goulburn will benefit directly from this investment.

The wind farm will help clean up power generation in NSW and:

• Reduce greenhouse gas emissions by over 90,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide for each year that it is operating;
• Reduce water used in cooling NSW coal-fired power stations by over 110 million litres per annum; and
• Reduce annual emissions of sulphur dioxide by more than 500,000 kilograms, and nitrogen oxide by more than 220,000 kilograms.

Director Martin Poole said “Today’s announcement of planning approval for Conroy’s Gap wind farm, together with the new NSW Government’s Renewable Energy Targets, brings renewed confidence in the development of NSW wind farms. Epuron hopes to expand on our approved wind farm developments with a number of new wind farms in the region.”

Epuron will now start work on sourcing wind turbines and making the commercial arrangements necessary for project construction to begin. In the past, Epuron has already received development approvals for two projects at Snowy Plains (30 megawatts, near Berridale) and Cullerin Range (30 megawatts, near Goulburn)

The company continues to measure the wind resource around NSW through its network of more than a dozen wind monitoring stations. Monitoring stations in the Goulburn and Yass areas continue to demonstrate one of the strongest and most consistent wind resources in NSW.