The only way he can justify the expense of a 10-kilowatt wind turbine, which would have the capacity to supply electricity to three houses, workshop and woolshed, and two large water pumps on his property, “Ruby Hills”, is to be paid for feeding surplus energy to the power grid.

And here’s the rub: while Mr Burgess pays Country Energy about 15 cents a kilowatt hour for mains power, Country Energy will only pay him three to five cents/kW hour for the energy he would feed back to the grid from the wind turbine.

“At that rate I estimate that it will take about 95 years to recoup my investment,” he said.

His problem is the size of the turbine. If he wanted to install a turbine up to 4.9kW (about three kilowatts will run a standard household), he could feed excess power back to the grid and get paid the wholesale rate.

But above 4.9kW he is classed as a competitor—and the tariff Country Energy is prepared to pay plummets accordingly.

So despite Mr Burgess being prepared to invest $200,000 to make his annual farm usage of 75,000kWh independent of fossil fuels (amid all the talk of climate change and peak oil), the exercise is being made prohibitively expensive by a rule-bound authority.

“It seems this arbitrary five kW limit has nothing to do with commonsense, and everything to do with protecting the fossil fuel-based infrastructure,” he said.