Teaching sequence

Work through this resource material in the following sequence:

10 minutes

Tune In: Grand (wind farm) designs

15 minutes

Find Out: Factors that influence wind farm location

20 minutes

Take Action: Evaluating wind farm location and layout

5 minutes

Reflection

Learning intentions and success criteria

Students will:

explore the factors that influence the location and layout of wind farms
evaluate how these considerations impact the efficiency and sustainability of renewable energy projects.

Students can:

design a wind farm layout that optimises turbine placement based on wind resource data and spacing guidelines
evaluate the suitability of different locations for a wind farm by considering factors such as wind density, environmental impact, and proximity to transmission lines
justify their chosen wind farm location and layout by providing specific examples and reasoning based on analysis of data.

Tune In: Grand (wind farm) designs

Step 1

Start this lesson by telling your students that they will be acting as a renewable energy company that is hoping to create a new wind farm of 10 turbines in your local area.

Divide your students into groups of 3-4 and ensure everyone has access to a device.

Using 1 device, students should head to Google Maps and find their local suburb.

Using another device, students should head to the Global Wind Atlas (https://globalwindatlas.info/en) and ask students to select Mean Power Density from the Wind Layers list.

Step 2

Your students' task is to act as a wind farm planner and decide, using Google Maps (https://www.google.com.au/maps/preview) view of your local area and the Global Wind Atlas, where a suitable location for a wind farm might be.

Explain to students that the Global Wind Atlas is a free resource that was created to help people and organisations identify high-wind areas for wind power generation. The ‘mean power density’ option is a measure of wind resource. The warmer the colour, the more dense the wind power is in that location.

As students browse the maps, encourage them to either screenshot or drop pins where they think suitable locations would be. For each location they choose, they should write down in their workbooks at least 3 reasons why they have chosen this location, and at least 1 potential limitation of the location.

Note: Refrain from giving students hints about what they should look for in a wind farm location. The later sections of this lesson will look into the factors affecting wind farm and turbine placement in detail for students to build upon their initial thoughts.

Step 3

Invite students to share their potential wind farm locations with the class. Identify any commonalities or stark differences in their choices and discuss the factors that students considered when choosing their farm locations.

Find Out: Factors that influence wind farm location

Step 1

Allocate students into groups of 6 and assign each student within the group to 1 of the 6 case studies below (so that each group covers all 6 case studies).

Each case study shows the construction, planning or people involved with different wind farms within Queensland. Using the questions provided with each video, students should read or watch their case study and use the Student Worksheet to record anything they see that would influence where a wind farm is located.

Encourage students to keep an open mind and consider all possibilities for aspects that impact location. This means considering multiple perspectives, such as the environment, workers, local communities, people who might be impacted, and efficiencies.

Case study	Questions	Suggested answers
Robert Liston - Truck Driver (webpage)	• How long and heavy can the wind turbine components be? • What challenges are there with transporting these materials to the site? • How does this influence the location?	The size of the wind turbines means they are challenging to transport to the wind farm, especially if the roads are windy, hilly or densely populated. Locations must have good road and rail access, as this is essential for the planning, construction, operation and maintenance of wind turbines.
Dulacca Wind Farm (YouTube)	• What do you notice about the landscape and location? • What types of work do you think the people in the turbines were doing? Could anyone do this work? What might this mean for the location of a wind farm? • What infrastructure was also nearby? Why might this be an important factor in building a wind farm?	The location is quite remote, flat and relatively clear of dense vegetation. There is farmland very close, which suggests the wind farm is possibly on someone's farm/property. The workers are skilled and would need to access the site relatively easily. There is a power substation nearby responsible for distributing electricity to the grid, suggesting it is essential for wind farms to be close to transmission lines.
MacIntyre Wind Farm (YouTube)	• What do you notice about the landscape and location? • What machinery do you see being used to construct the turbines? How does this influence the location? • There are a lot of workers. What type of jobs do you think they all have? • Can you see any towns or suburbs near the farm in the video? What do you think this means for the workers?	There is a lot of big, bulky machinery such as trucks and cranes, meaning the location must have good road access in order for this machinery to get to the site. The location seems remote, and there are a lot of workers, meaning they need somewhere to live close to the site or a way of getting to the site.
MacIntyre Wind Farm - Alice the site engineer (YouTube)	• What do you notice about the landscape and location? • What machinery and building materials do you see being used to construct the turbines? How does this influence the location? • How did the location need to be altered to ensure you could get to all of the wind turbines?	There is a lot of big, bulky machinery such as trucks and cranes, meaning the location must have good road access in order for this machinery to get to the site. Concrete trucks also need to be able to get in and access the site.More roads and access routes needed to be created to ensure each turbine was able to be accessed.
Wambo Wind Farm \| Working with our community (YouTube)	• What does the wind farm need to be connected to? • What types of locations do these structures and infrastructures pass through? What needs to be considered?	The wind farm needs to be connected to the grid and transmission lines so that the generated electricity can be used. Aspects to consider include landowners and farmers, cultural heritage, different councils, and rules/regulations.
The Proposed Upper Burdekin Windfarm (Factsheet)	• What needs to be considered when choosing a location for a wind farm? • What type of protocols are in place to ensure environmental considerations are taken into account when designing and planning wind farms?	Special environmental landscape elements need to be considered. Environments need to be protected so future generations can enjoy them and local flora and fauna can continue to live and thrive. This can include parks or areas with animal habitats and ecosystems.

If your students don’t have access to YouTube on their personal devices, you may like to encourage them to research what they can by using the factsheets and webpages and then choose a few of the videos to watch together as a class.

Step 2

Once students have finished with their case study, encourage each member of the group to share their learning to start to bring together a picture of the different aspects to consider when planning a wind farm.

Discuss these common findings as a class, highlighting the suggested answers above (if students haven't mentioned them) to ensure they gain a good understanding of the factors they should consider.

Step 3

Explain to students that so far, they have looked at factors that influence the overall location of wind farms. We know that wind is the most important feature of choosing where to place a wind farm. However, there is also another layer (arguably the most important) of planning to consider – where the wind turbines will be placed within the location!

Invite opinions from your class on what might influence a wind turbine's location within the wind farm. Prompt them with the layouts they saw of the farms in the case studies, as well as any wind turbines they may have encountered in everyday life. Are the turbines close to each other? Why might this be?

Step 4

Explain to your students that wind turbines need to be placed far enough apart so they don't interfere with each other. When 1 turbine is too close to another, it disturbs the wind, making the next turbine less efficient. This is called the ‘wake effect’.

Show your students the image of the wake effect on the attached Visual Explainer and explain that the wake effect is similar to what happens when a cyclist rides right behind a car. When the car moves, it pushes the air out of the way, and the cyclist can ride in the calmer air behind the car with less effort.

When the wind hits a turbine, the blades slow down the wind and make it all messy behind the turbine. If another turbine is too close, it ends up in this messy wind and can't work either. That's why we need to space turbines out, so each 1 gets a strong, clean flow of wind.

Step 5

Show your students the next slide on the attached Visual Explainer, which shows that a good rule of thumb is to place turbines at least 5 rotor diameters apart in the direction the wind usually blows and 3 rotor diameters apart in the other direction. (Note: The rule of thumb varies depending on states and environments.)

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Take Action: Evaluating wind farm location and layout

Preparation

In this section of the lesson, students will use the information they have learnt to provide some planning considerations for the wind farm location they initially chose at the beginning of the lesson. You might like to choose the level of depth your students go into, depending on the amount of time you have to dedicate to this task:

Teachers with more time might like to structure this as an assessment task. Instruct students to research more widely to create a report that provides a detailed overview of their wind farm, including a thorough analysis of the planning considerations and a diagram of the layout of the proposed wind farm.

If you are running short on time, students can use the table in the Student Worksheet to provide some brief responses based on the general information outlined in the Considerations in Wind Farm Design Factsheet.

Step 1

Before embarking on this Take Action, you might like to share the following career profile of a renewable engineer who works in the wind industry with your students. Display it on the board and talk through it together. Invite students to pull out parts they find interesting, as well as aspects that consider the planning and design of wind farms. Prompt with questions such as:

What do engineers do?
How do engineers working in this space tackle these projects?
What design and planning considerations are there in these projects?

Extension opportunity: Encourage students to look at the Future Energy Jobs Guide as they go through the steps of the Take Action to find different careers and professions that would be responsible for each stage of the planning, design, and construction of a wind farm, focusing on careers they think would suit them and their skills.

Step 2

In the same groups, provide your class with the Considerations in Wind Farm Design Factsheet, which outlines detailed information about all the aspects they have researched and discovered so far. Their task is to use this information, as well as the Global Wind Atlas and Google Maps, to analyse the location they chose for a wind farm at the beginning of the lesson, taking into account all of the information they now have of good wind farm planning.
Ask students to have another look at the map they placed the wind turbines on at the start of the lesson and ask them to do a site analysis, taking into consideration the aspects in the factsheet. Students should use the factors and guiding questions below (also available on the Student Worksheet) to analyse their site and justify their choice. For each factor, they should make a judgement on whether this site would be a good choice, and make some suggestions for why it is a good choice or what might need to be done to ensure the wind farm could go ahead.

Noise considerations	Is the location near houses, suburbs or communities?
Accessibility	Is the location close to existing good-quality roads? How easy would site access be for the building materials, machinery and workers?
Land use	Can you tell if the location is a part of a natural environment that needs protecting, or someone's farmland? Are there any green areas, landmarks or spaces where people might gather?
Environmental considerations	What environmental considerations might there be for this location? Does it look like it could be a habitat for native species?
Proximity to transmission lines	Refer to the Queensland Electricity Generation Map, and ensure the transmission network is toggled on in the selected layers section. This will give the locations of existing transmission lines in Queensland (orange lines). Is your proposed location close to existing lines? What might be the impact of this?
Wind resource	Using the Global Wind Atlas, ensure you have selected ‘Mean Power Density’ in the wind layers section and ‘200m’ in the bottom right corner. This will display the wind power density at the height your turbines will be. Is the wind resource sufficient here?

Note: The Electricity Generation Map shows the location of transmission lines in Queensland only. Teachers from other states might like to use the following resource: Electricity Transmission Lines - Digital Atlas of Australia to visualise the transmission networks in your area.

Step 3

Explain to students that the wind farm they are designing will be using the same style of turbine used on the MacIntyre Wind Farm in Queensland. These turbines are approximately 230m tall and have a blade length of 80m (Source: Building the foundations for Australia’s largest wind farm - Cosmos).

Using the guidelines for turbine spacing in the factsheet, students should also design a layout for the wind farm and calculate how much area their 10-turbine farm will take up.

Step 4

If time permits, you might like students to share their analysis and wind farm design with the rest of the class or another group. Discuss the learning students made:

What were the difficult aspects?
What do we need more information about?
What similarities and differences in student responses were there?

To round out the task, you might like to display the Queensland Electricity Generation Map on your board and discuss as a class if groups chose locations similar to existing wind farms.

Note: Ensure the ‘wind’ button is selected in the ‘fuel type filters’ section. Dark blue icons indicate the wind farm is existing and white buttons indicate a proposed site.

Reflection

Reflect on the lesson with your class by posing the following questions:

How did you ensure your wind farm location and design were ethical and sustainable? Give specific examples.
How have your opinions or thoughts about renewable energy projects changed after completing this task?

Planning and Designing Wind Farms

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