FLYERS Creek Wind Farm (close to Orange and Blayney) is certainly being used as a human laboratory, or rather the residents who will have the misfortune to live in close proximity to it are being used as guinea pigs.
The NSW Draft Wind Farm Guidelines are recommending for neighbours close to wind turbines a minimum setback distance to the nearest turbine of two kilometres. Victoria has also recently brought in a setback distance of two kilometres. Even then there is evidence that two kilometres is an insufficient setback.
The NSW government has accepted, via its draft guidelines, that two kilometres is the minimum distance to protect the health, safety, welfare and interests of non-hosts. However that will only apply to new projects being submitted to the department for approval.
Flyers Creek Wind Farm (and 16 other wind farm projects under consideration) will be assessed under the old South Australian guidelines where two kilometres is not even a consideration.
The Flyers Creek Wind Farm will have 28 neighbour residences within two kilometres of the nearest industrial wind turbine? And potentially that means 28 families with the possibility of children and elderly people who are especially vulnerable.
Even worse, several of these residences have more than one wind turbine within two kilometres. Wind turbine noise is cumulative.
A quick look at Infigen Energys maps in its environmental assessment shows that eight non-hosts will have one wind turbine within two kilometres, five will have two wind turbines, eight will have three wind turbines, one will have four wind turbines, one will have five wind turbines, three will have six wind turbines and one will have seven wind turbines. But the mind-boggling record is the one residence that will have nine wind turbines within a radius of two kilometres.
This is planning gone mad.
What government honouring its duty of care to its citizens would allow an industrial wind turbine project in such a densely populated rural area?
The Flyers Creek Wind Farm project should not be approved under any circumstance.
It seems the NSW government is giving this project very serious consideration. In light of these very startling planning atrocities it is not too late for sanity to prevail and I appeal to the Department of Planning and Infrastructure to give this matter its gravest consideration.
The fact that it is willing to allow projects to be assessed under criteria which even it considers inadequate is a crime against those neighbours who will be the sacrificial lambs to the rampant industrialisation of rural land by the wind industry and its attendant host windfarmers.
Blayney Council has remained deafeningly silent about the Flyers Creek Wind Farm.
Where is its support for the residents in the shire who are going to be adversely affected?
Dr Colleen Watts OAM