It strikes me raiderup that the author Trevor Paddenburg has not fully understood the wind power statistics he has commented on.
The list of stats from the Clean Energy Council wind farm data for projects over 100kW clearly says - "Installed Capacity".
So when TP writes - "Clean Energy Council data for significant wind farm projects shows WA generates less than 500MW of power from a total of 308 turbines around the state.
That’s half of Victoria’s wind generation at 939MW from 454 turbines and well below South Australia, which generates 1205MW of electricity from 561 turbines."
What the stats tell is that WA turbines on average are smaller than Victoria and South Australia.
What exactly the wind turbines generate in GWhours per year is another issue and if anybody has a source for those stats for the various states please post a link.
The BP Statistical Review of World Energy June 2015 http://www.bp.com/statisticalreview
says Australia in 2014 has 4056 MW installed wind capacity and generates 10.2 TerraWatt hours of wind electricity which is a 28% capacity factor. If wind was to generate full power for 28% of the time - then 72% of the time the turbines sit idle.
