How the wind blows in Walcha: a community divided over renewable energy

Siblings Ross and Holly Fletcher at their family farm near Walcha, NSW, standing at the proposed site of one of the 119 wind turbines that will make up the Winterbourne windfarm. Photograph: Tom Plevey/The Guardian

In Walcha, the locals say, the wind blows straight up from Cooma and clears the 800km distance in about two minutes flat. It’s that wind that has made it a prized site for renewable energy projects.

The northern inland New South Wales town is in the southernmost lobe of the New England Renewable Energy Zone (Rez), the northernmost of the five zones set up by the NSW government to cluster new wind and solar projects together for ease of storage and transmission.