The world's southernmost wind farm has been opened in Antarctica and is providing power to New Zealand's Scott Base and the US McMurdo Station. To watch a news video, click . The three-turbine Ross Island wind farm, in a region where winter temperatures can approach -60 Celsius, is designed to supply about 11 per cent of the power used by the bases, cutting their diesel consumption by a projected 463,000 litres per year. There is still a large experimental aspect to operating wind turbines under such extreme conditions. "The philosophy is to get this one up and running, get it operating for a year, and it can show us the way forward," Scott Bennett, the project manager with , told . Meridian Energy is the New Zealand government-owned power company that built and runs the turbines. The Ross Island wind farm is not Antarctica's first wind-power installation. That honour goes to Australia's Mawson Station, which has up and running. We wish both projects well. If successful, they could pave the way for wind turbines to replace fossil fuel-fired generators at many remote resource extraction projects. That includes mines in chilly parts of Canada and China that produce the metals used in solar cells.