The first thing to remember is that the desalination plant
will be a lot cheaper than moving Sydney.
Look at it as an insurance policy.
It might need to be enlarged or duplicated or even triplicate, but
if we are entering a dry period then it will be money well spent.

Now how you power it can be all sorts of arrangements.
Not knowing how long it takes to start up and shut down makes it
difficult to make suggestions, but it might be able to follow the the
wind speed at the wind farm site.

Low damns or not they should run it while ever the damns are below
say 90% and try and build up a good stock of water.
Just seems common sense to me.

Isn't it true that 100% = 65% in the mind of the Labor Party?

I have been led to understand Warragamba Dam can not be fully filled.

A mate of mine has a very large wind farm on his property and I would estimate the excavation work for one windmill would exceed $140,000. Go and stand next to one for an education. The metal alone would have to be in excess of $250,000. They also receive a surprising amount of maintenance which I would estimate to be at least fortnightly.

Those who think windmills are aesthetic should go back to design school.

They are also surprisingly noisy. whooshing sounds can be heard over a kilometre away. The wildlife like sitting in the shade they produce and my mate has NEVER sighted a dead bird at the base.

I support windmills and desalination if for no other reason than it is an insurance policy secondly the Labor Party has finally made a proactive decision. Won't it be nice when they manage to build railway stations while a housing project is built instead of 25 years later.

The Western Australians manage to build stations and housing at the same time.

The noise from the ones at Albany I have been told is very low indeed.
The noise level may be a function of blade design.

The economics of wind farms is not very good as they only average
about 25% of rated output. This blows the economics out the window
if you pardon the pun.
We should be hoping and praying that geothermal & solar thermal
can be made to work economically.

and or wind speed

Cowboy Joe is right in questioning the capital cost of the sort of wind turbines used on wind farms. See: http://www.rise.org.au/info/Applic/Windfarm/index.html

Dismally unclear 'journalism' by the SMH reporters!

It seems the terms of the contract is for Sydney Water (the owners?/operators? of the desalination plant) to take 180,000 MWH per year at an annual cost of $9 million for each of the 20 years the contract will run. This works out at $50 per MWH, and is equivalent to $0.05 per KWH; around about the present domestic consumer off-peak rate for electricity. Over 20 years, $180 million will be paid for 3,600,000 MWH of wind-generated electricity.

So despite the Herald's claim that Dr Schott (the Sydney Water CEO) would not reveal the price to be paid for the electricity, she did in fact do so, unless there is much more that we, the public, are not being told in this story.

The Herald article seems to imply that the Capital Wind Farm will possibly have more generating capacity than that required to supply the 180,000 MWH per annum that supposedly represents all the electricity required by Sydney Water to run the desalinator. The interesting thing, I understand, with respect to wind farms, is that actual rates of power delivery fluctuate, literally, with the wind! So if THIS wind farm is correctly able to be claimed to be generating the TOTAL power requirement for the desalinator, then it must be being operated in conjunction with a grid supply of significantly greater delivery capacity that actually guarantees the round-the-clock electricity supply Sydney Water says, in the SMH article, it requires.

If NSW sells off its electricity business, how will the Capital Wind Farm then be able to be sure at what price it can sell electricity to its still necessary new 'grid partner' in order to guarantee both continuous supply to its Sydney Water customer, and remain financially viable?

Or is there an existing NSW government/Capital Wind Farm grid interaction contract?

The unreliability of wind farms can be reduced by connecting to the
same grid wind farms that are separated geographically.
This increases the reliability but does not fix the problem.
A friend of mine who used to commission power stations said that 25% of
what is known as unreliable generators is the maximum that can be
allowed on the network. This 25% figure has also been stated in articles
that I have read elsewhere.
There was a widespread blackout in Germany that was blamed on a drop in the wind.
I have not been able to confirm that assertion.
Spinning reserves have to be kept on line to take up the load when the
wind drops. This spinning reserve costs money and burns fuel and is one
of the causes of poor economics of wind farms.

There is light at the end of the tunnel in that ultra capacitors might
be developed in the future to be big enough to iron out the wind variations.