Huxley Hill Wind Farm (also known as the King Island Wind Farm) is a wind power station at King Island, Tasmania, Australia, of around 1600 residents, owned by Hydro Tasmania, 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 N26 wind turbines at a cost of $2.5 M ($3,300/kW),[1] then in 2003 with two 850 kW Vestas Turbines, to provide a total wind generating capacity of 2.5 MW of electricity. Wind generation provides around 35% of the annual generation.[2]
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.[3]
Flow battery storage
Diagram of a Flow Battery
During the 2003 expansion a vanadium redox flow battery was installed at a cost of $4M (or $20,000 per kW),[4] containing 55,000 litres of vanadium based electrolyte—one of the first such installations on a wind farm. This allowed up to 800 kWh 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.[5] 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.[6]
