After a long haul, the last stage 2 turbine was finally installed at the massive Golden Plains wind farm in Victoria in July. Expected to be Australia’s largest renewable power wind farm when it is finished, Golden Plains’ projected energy transmission will power 765,000 homes. About 60 kilometres north-west of Geelong and spread over nearly 17,000 hectares – about 170 square kilometres – Golden Plains is a work in progress. Construction on the finalised stage one began in 2023. Stage 1 is complete and contributing to the grid. Stage 2 has already started generating power. Stage 3, a separate project, is currently in the planning phase.
Despite some local community resistance, Golden Plains has been held up as a model of renewable power generation at a time when new wind farms are facing increasing costs and obstacles and the pace of installation has slowed.
“The Golden Plains Wind Farm will be able to power every regional Victorian home – delivering lower bills for Victorian families,” said then Victorian minister for energy and resources Lily D’Ambrosio when Golden Plains stage 1 first powered up in 2024.
Wind power contributed 14 per cent of energy generated in Australia last year, according to federal government statistics, lagging only solar in renewable power generation. Unlike solar power, wind power can be generated 24 hours a day, a useful complement to solar. After the large initial outlay on construction, wind farms do not require much expensive maintenance, and power purchase agreements with energy retailers can ensure steady income.
Yet new wind power projects face difficulties in the current economic climate, and Victoria launched Australia’s first offshore wind auction in late August amid doubts about costs and feasibility. Financial commitments for new large-scale wind and solar power generation fell 46 per cent in the year to December 2025, the Clean Energy Council reported in May, and onshore wind commitments fell 59 per cent.
Both offshore and onshore wind power projects face soaring construction costs. Overall, the need for new transmission lines, lengthy waits for government approvals and increasing community resistance have combined to dampen interest in wind power investment.
Alison Reeve, energy and climate change director at the Grattan Institute, says the combination of difficulties is proving time-consuming and costly. “A lot of these problems are not unique to wind, but that’s where we’re seeing it because that’s where the build has been held up,” she says.
Timelines for wind projects have slipped and construction costs have blown out by about 100 per cent since 2024, mostly a result of supply chain inflation, she adds. It now takes about eight years to shepherd a wind project through the Australian approvals process, compared with about five years for solar. At the same time, the cost of wind turbines has increased internationally as demand has risen around the world.
At the same time, there is growing community resistance to both wind farms and transmission lines in some rural areas. Post-Covid, many ordinary people are fed up with following government instructions and they often don’t want transmission lines marching across their land, Reeve says, even though they are paid for it and history proves it does no harm to grazing animals or crops.
Unlike solar energy, wind power doesn’t provide individual domestic energy security – there’s no pay-off in shrinking household power bills. It’s bulk power – it goes into the communal pot, Reeve says that can be a problem, particularly in rural communities. “Unless they get the benefit-sharing model right, they end up with one farmer who’s getting all the money for hosting it, and a bunch of other farmers who have to look at it. I think that causes some resentment as well.”
There are laudable examples of companies engaging in a genuine listening process with communities and working with local councils to propose feasible renewables projects, Reeve says. “They realised they weren’t going to build the economically optimal project, but they were going to build something that could actually get built,” she adds. “I’m hopeful that we can pick one up as a template for how to do it well.”
Meanwhile, transmitting power long distances from renewable power projects is a growing problem. “Most of the wind that’s been built to date has been able to use existing transmission lines,” Reeve says. “But now that we’re building a lot more, we actually need new transmission lines to go with it.
Professor Tapan Saha, from the University of Queensland’s school of electrical engineering and computer science, says renewable power plants, built a long way from major cities, mostly require new, long-distance transmission lines. These lines can be expensive and they can take a long time to build, given supply chain and labour constraints, he adds, so careful consideration and long-term planning is needed.
Other factors should feed into the renewables planning mix, such as the potential for periods when the wind is not blowing and the sun is not shining. Most wind farms now have large battery capacity, but it will only last so long. “This is a technical challenge that they need to understand how they will cover if solar and wind generated power is not available,” Saha says.
The Australian