"Generally speaking, I think they regret not fighting harder."
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That is how Wellington district farmer Michael Lyons describes his community's feelings a number of years after a wind farm came to their district.
Mr Lyons was one of the speakers at the Oberon Against Wind Towers (OAWT) group's latest community meeting about wind farm proposals in the area.
The meeting attracted a crowd of hundreds on Thursday, June 27 that spilled from the main room in the Oberon RSL into an adjoining space.
"I am a farmer at Wellington and the Bodangora Wind Farm forms the northern part of my farm's boundary," Mr Lyons said.
"We form probably the majority of the southern part of the Bodangora Wind Farm."
![Oberon Against Wind Towers committee member Frank O'Connor and speaker Michael Lyons from the Wellington district, whose community has had a wind farm for a number of years. Oberon Against Wind Towers committee member Frank O'Connor and speaker Michael Lyons from the Wellington district, whose community has had a wind farm for a number of years.](/images/transform/v1/crop/frm/7PapGKjYPrPEgYfvAPt3Wq/8ae15d4c-04b2-48a4-bf71-6e0f4c1c25db.jpeg/r0_16_3152_1979_w1200_h678_fmax.jpg)
The people of his district, Mr Lyons said, "went through the same processes that you guys [in the Oberon district] have been through here".
"And I have to say I really do wish you all the luck in the world," he said.
The Bodangora project, on private land, features 33 turbines.
The Wellington Times reported the first sod-turning for the project in July 2017 and the arrival of main turbine components in 2018.
The wind farm started operating in 2019.
The most likely of the two projects in the Oberon district to go ahead at this stage, The Pines Wind Farm, is proposed for state forests and will feature turbines of 300m tall.
"We forewarned, back in 2010, that once you let one project in, you're going to very quickly have others coming right behind it," Mr Lyons said.
![A big crowd was at the Oberon RSL Club for the Oberon Against Wind Towers group's latest public meeting. A big crowd was at the Oberon RSL Club for the Oberon Against Wind Towers group's latest public meeting.](/images/transform/v1/crop/frm/7PapGKjYPrPEgYfvAPt3Wq/62f372eb-b34d-441a-a520-5f52b22147b2.jpg/r0_501_3520_1979_w1200_h678_fmax.jpg)
"The reason is because they've pretty much got the infrastructure built with the first one, so it's not hard for the other ones to piggyback on.
"In Wellington, we've got the Bodangora Wind Farm, we have two big solar farms - this all happens to be on my road, aren't I lucky? - and now there's another one that has just been started."
Mr Lyons said the project had divided his community and he believed that objections to the project had been ignored.
Asked if there were any lingering bad feelings in the community about the Bodangora Wind Farm, Mr Lyons was blunt.
"We lost," he said of himself and others who objected to the project.
"We can let it eat us up or we can move on. Personally, I've chosen to move on."
Company's say
Iberdrola Australia, which owns the Bodangora Wind Farm, says it generates enough renewable energy to power approximately 49,000 homes each year.
Iberdrola also says the Bodangora Wind Farm Community Fund allocates a minimum of $50,000 of community funding each year and the arrangement is in place for at least the first 25 years of the operation of the wind farm.
The community fund is administered by Dubbo Regional Council.
Iberdrola says it also contributes $17,000 each year to the Bodangora Wind Farm Community Enhancement Fund, which sponsors local events.
Grazier Simon Barton, whose property hosts the Bodangora wind turbines, said earlier this year that the turbines had "drought-proofed" his income.
"It's helped us financially - enormously, I would say," he said.
"During the drought, we survived off livestock sales. Even though we were buying a lot of fodder, we were also selling a lot of livestock. So that kept us going through the drought.
"But then after the drought broke in 2020 we went through the financial drought because we didn't have any stock to sell and we were replacing our herd. So we weren't selling stock, we were keeping them to build our numbers back up.
"We're just very lucky that we've got this income from the wind farm that's a stable source of income."