The company behind the controversial Jupiter wind farm has taken another swing at getting the green light to build 88 wind turbines near Canberra, a year after NSW officials sent them back to the drawing board.
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The NSW Department of Planning and Environment struck out EPYC's application to build the wind farm five kilometres out of the Tarago township last October, after it found the company had not sufficiently addressed environmental and community concerns.
But the joint Australian-Spanish venture has come back to the NSW Department of Environment and Planning with a revised proposal, which has now opened for public consultation.
While the original Jupiter wind farm proposal was to build 100 turbines across 25 rural properties, the new one outlines plans to build 88 turbines across 23 rural properties.
EPYC project manager Ibrahim Eid said the revised environmental impact statement included consultation with community members up to three kilometres away.
But residents of the surrounding regions have vowed to once again fight the proposal, which EPYC has been trying to get off the ground since 2014.
Dr Michael Crawford from the Residents Against Jupiter Wind Turbines group said the wind farm would have an enormous impact on the 250 homes within a five-kilometre radius.
"That's an enormous number of residences to be affected. Large numbers of them will have large industrial structures in their view," Dr Crawford said.
Dr Crawford said residents railing against the proposal weren't against renewable energy, in fact many lived off the grid with power supplied by their own solar panels.
"What you've got to understand is people live in this sort of area because they don't want to live in urban or industrial surroundings and what they're going to have plonked down in front of them are 173-metre turbines which are higher than all but about 20 buildings in Sydney," Dr Crawford said.
The wind farm will be within 15 kilometres of two operational wind farms, one approved wind farm and a solar farm.
The environmental impact statement acknowledged there could be wind turbines within two kilometres of properties not part of the farm.
It also stated there were 43 threatened fauna species, including the glossy black cockatoo and the spotted-tail quoll, however the turbines, substations and other ancillary buildings would be built on cleared paddocks.
The company will carry out targeted ecological surveys to determine where each wind turbine will sit.
Public submissions on the proposed wind farm close in February.
