Steve Price: Aussie farms will be destroyed by green energy infrastructure

Paddocks full of solar panels, birds slaughtered by wind turbines and giant powerlines on farmland will all become the norm if Victorians want to meet emissions targets.

The northeast town of Glenrowan in Victoria is best known as the location of bushranger Ned Kelly’s last stand.

On June 28, 1880, Kelly was captured after a siege at the Glenrowan Inn and the rest of his gang including his brother Dan were killed.

The gang had murdered three police two years earlier at Stringybark Creek. Ned was tried for murder and executed.

Since then, the Glenrowan community has traded on the history of the Kelly gang and its demise in their town.

Today Glenrowan might yet again become the modern- day example of a last stand, this time not by a criminal gang but by Australian farmers.

Glenrowan is about two and a half hours northeast of Melbourne up the Hume Highway. As you approach the off-ramp to Glenrowan going north as I did this week and look to your right you think your eyes are deceiving you.

A paddock that would normally be home to sheep or maybe cattle is instead a construction zone that’s well advanced.

The paddocks across an area of around 323 hectares — or nearly 800 acres in the old measurement scale — are well on the way to becoming home to 373,000 solar panels arranged in rows like a wheat crop.

Swathes of farmland will be filled with solar panels if the state wants to reach its emissions target.

To describe this as a shock to see is an understatement. Known as the Glenrowan West Solar Farm it’s owned by a company called Wirtgen, a German-based road construction outfit with assets in Brazil, China and India.

Wirtgen started out making road building equipment and now is heavily invested in renewable energy projects.

Like many foreign outfits they have realised Australia’s new Labor Government, and its aim for a 43 per cent reduction in emissions by 2030 (seven years away), is a profit goldmine too tempting to ignore.

The pots of sunny gold and windy profits are set to flow into the hands of mainly foreign-owned corporations.

The Kelly country solar panel farm is just an obvious example of what this unhinged rush to renewable energy is going to do to rural Australia and its landscapes.

This week we witnessed in the Melbourne CBD a simmering protest movement that is going to run head on into foreign-funded renewable companies that see wind and sun power as the new goldrush.

Farmers from regional Victoria trucked their heavy equipment to the city fringe, unloaded the tractors and then unloaded on AEMO – the Australian Energy Market Operator – that wants to assist in the construction of massive towers and transmission lines across the state.

The no-nonsense food producing farmers, like the Kelly gang, are up for a fight and those of us who live comfortable lives in the city and nearby regions need to support them.

As the former Chief Scientist Alan Finkel wrote in a recent book on the issues of getting to net zero, we will see forests of wind farms carpeting hills and cliffs from sea to sea.

He warned us to think about “endless arrays of solar panels, giant factories building wind turbines and the sobering observation of “endless kilometres of transmission lines to connect it all.”

Finkel – an electrical engineer and neuroscientist — made the accurate and blunt point: “We’ve, after 30 years, shaved off 4 per cent of emissions and now need to shave off 83 per cent.”

It’s these grim but accurate warnings that should make us all realise what a pipe dream and dangerous folly our state and federal governments are embarking upon.

Wind farms are already popping up across the state. Picture: Zoe Phillips

Are Victorians OK with massive swathes of country Victoria being carpeted with kilometres of solar panels?

Do you really want to be that selfish suburban Greenie comfortable with the knowledge your hot water is being produced by giant wind turbines that slaughter native bird life in their thousands? I hope not.

Is net zero worth destroying food producing grazing and cropping land, owned by hard working generational farming families forced to open their farms to giant transmission towers?

As the Spring St protestors from farms across the state pointed out this week, their small businesses and their lifestyles are to be brutally destroyed by this fanciful green dream.

How is it that major transport links like freeways or airport extensions, even housing estates, can be held up by some endangered bird or lizard and the State Government steps in but if its wind or solar it’s open season.

Farmers I spoke to on Sky News this week were on the edge of tears. One was standing on his back porch near Donald and looking at the view, imagining it obscured by a 10-storey high wind turbine.

Asked if he would stop it and lock his gate and refuse money for access, he didn’t hesitate in saying he would fight to the end.

Up until now the green dream pushed by global warming warriors has been an ambitious wish list selling sun and wind as our net zero solution.

Now that the giant turning blades and acres of solar panels are sprouting like the farm crops of old, it’s time to back our farmers.

Love

Sydney’s graffiti clean on-time modern trains running every three minutes during peak hour.

Country bakeries and salad rolls on a road trip to Sydney.

Crowd behaviour inside the Matilda’s games – not a flare to be seen.

Finally, an Opposition willing to lay out the debate on nuclear energy.

Loathe

Inexplicable rise in the cost of a litre of petrol and diesel in the last two weeks.

Fizzer of a national Cabinet meeting with no real solutions for the housing crisis.

The PM Anthony Albanese refusing to accept even reading the extended Uluru document is worth doing.

Seeing two superstar Tigers in Jack Riewoldt and Trent Cotchin calling time on their stellar careers.

Originally published as Steve Price: Aussie farms will be destroyed by green energy infrastructure