Wind farms a blow to local communities
small communities bear the brunt of labor’s renewable targets. yet local objections to industrial scale wind farms are rarely heard. BY NIck Cater.
The small town of Rye Park in NSW is one of scores of benighted communities from the Bass Strait to the Atherton Tablelands where citizens are defending their little corner of Australia against industrial-scale renewable energy.
Each is fighting their own lonely battle, outgunned and outmanoeuvred by well-financed conglomerates and their smooth-talking community engagement teams. Since renewable energy is naively assumed to be a good thing, local objections are seldom heard in city-based media or on the ABC. No journalist has had the curiosity to visit the construction site, which stretches along a hilltop ridge for 35km north of the Hume Highway or to find out what it’s like to be living in the middle of it.
In Rye Park, it’s not climate change that keeps them awake at night but the procession of semi-trailers laden with aggregate that begins at dawn pulverising their narrow main street. Some 21,000 semi-trailer movements and 800 oversized loads more than 80m long are due to pass through before construction is complete. This is what it takes to create a super-sized wind-generation plant linking a chain of 66 wind turbines, each higher than the Sydney Harbour Bridge.
It’s clear Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen is unlikely to meet his 2030 renewable energy target, which requires the construction of 480 turbines even bigger than those at Rye Park every year until 2030.
Last week’s update from the Australian Energy Market Operator shows that getting 28 gigawatts of new grid-scale wind and solar energy on line in the 366 remaining weeks is all but impossible. AEMO reports that just 6GW more is ready for construction. Another 3GW is partly approved. It seems highly unlikely enough new projects can move from proposal to completion in such a short time. Rye Park has taken more than 10 years of planning, will take more than two years to construct and is likely to cost more than $1bn once the overruns are in.
Approval will get only harder if Environment and Water Minister Tanya Plibersek inserts a set of new teeth into the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act as she has promised. Hopefully it will give better grounds to assess the considerable environmental cost of these mega-projects and present a less rose-coloured calculation of the benefits.
It might, for example, attribute more value to the life of a black falcon, listed as vulnerable under the NSW Biodiversity Conservation Act. The risk of a blade strike to these sooty-black, pale-throated birds of prey is classified “high” by Umwelt, the environmental consultants hired by Tilt Renewables to review the Rye Park proposal. A stronger approval process might have paid more attention to the little eagle, a stocky, feather-legged creature that also faces a high risk of being clouted by a 72m, 12-tonne blade.
Various degrees of concern apply to the impact of native vegetation clearance for the striped, legless lizard and the golden sun moth.
The consultants note that carving wide-tarmac access roads, felling trees and clearing scrub around turbine sites and under transmission lines will fragment native habitat corridors, hasten erosion and invite encroachment from weeds and feral animals.
When a project with an assessment as dire as this gets approval, but a land-based coalmine in central Queensland is blocked by a theoretical threat to the seafaring dugong, it becomes clear that in the world of diversity some animals are more equal than others.
One notable species omitted from the risk assessment is Homo sapiens, 230 of whom were known to be living in Rye Park at the time of the 2021 census. The median family income is $1300 a week, which, purely for the sake of comparison, is less than a third of the median family income in the teal stronghold of Mosman ($4502), where passion for renewable energy runs particularly high.
Rye Park residents may be blessed with wisdom by virtue of age and practical experience, but with only two university degree certificates per dozen adults compared with eight per dozen in Mosman, their ability to argue their case in the public square is somewhat diminished. No one in Rye Park self-identified as a journalist on the night of the 2021 census but in Mosman there were 81.
The loss of social licence, to use industry-speak, may become the biggest obstacle to the expansion of solar in Australia, just as it has for the gas sector. A little over a decade ago, rural communities in Queensland fighting the development of coal-seam gas teamed up with environmental activists to form Lock the Gate, an initiative engineered by cashed-up, slick environmental activists disguised as a grassroots movement. Lock the Gate’s ability to organise, run a media campaign and find the expertise and funding to launch lawfare sorties has been the biggest inhibitor to the drilling of gas.
No such green knight has come to the aid of communities fighting the industrial expansion of renewables. They lack the skills, time and finance to weaponise the plight of feathered, furry friends in the way the Wilderness Society has done for the southeastern long-eared bat and the regent honeyeater in their campaign to stop Santos drilling for gas in Narrabri, NSW.
There have been no calls from Simon Holmes a Court offering to raise an eight-figure sum to mobilise a political movement dedicated to their particular cause. Indeed, it is the tenacious propaganda from the renewables lobby that they are struggling to combat. The few Nationals and Liberal Party members who have defended their constituents against the incursion of wind turbines and solar plants have paid a high price through scurrilous, personalised attacks on social media. They have suffered the condemnation due to anyone named as a climate denier in the woke press.
Yet every Australian taxpayer and energy user has a stake in the fight, whether they realise it or not. The inflated cost of electricity that flows from the distorted allocation of capital to questionable projects such as Rye Park and the permanent scars to the natural landscape are everybody’s business. The cry for environmental justice by the green movement will ring hollow until the objections of those who stand between this Labor government and its vanity renewable target are properly heard.