Reduced wind farm buffer zones welcome says Australian Wind Alliance
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The wind farm industry says changes to buffer zones in Victoria are a common sense decision for renewable energy developments.
The State Government announced on Friday, the exclusion zone between houses and proposed wind turbine developments would be reduced from two kilometres to one.
The new laws also mean approval for projects will rest with the Planning Minister instead of local councils.
Andrew Bray from the Australian Wind Alliance said the changes wind back guidelines which had strangled new development for the past four years.
"There's no doubt that the federal situation has been the main roadblock to new development going ahead but in other states we're continuing to see new planning developments go through, but in Victoria that just wasn't the case," he said.
"So these changes will now mean that we will hopefully see new wind farm projects go through planning."
Mr Bray said uncertainty surrounding the Federal Government's Renewable Energy Target remained an issue.
"We would hope to see that resolved very soon though the Federal Government is being very unfavourable towards [the] Renewable Energy Target at the moment but hopefully we'll see a change in that and when we do we would then see new projects in Victoria there in the queue and ready to go," he said.
"I think it's really welcome to see this sort of common sense approach to wind farm planning come back in."
Topics: wind-energy, urban-development-and-planning, states-and-territories, vic, horsham-3400, portland-3305, warrnambool-3280, ballarat-3350
