Vikki Campion: Rural residents left in the lurch by greasy renewable consultants

The only winners in renewables so far are ‘community engagement’ workers who have no skin in the game, writes Vikki Campion, and who tackle the dirt roads with a hired new SUV.

The only winners in renewables so far are the greasers with “community engagement” on their business card, who go to the creaky timber town halls, tell a good yarn to what they believe are the bucolic imbeciles in front of them, and then high-five each other in the Qantas lounge and laugh at us over pinot back in Sydney’s eastern suburbs.

The winners are the propaganda merchants, coming fresh out of political offices, such as ex-Liberal minister Matt Kean who, thanks to his frighteningly ideological policies, practically gifted NSW to Labor Premier Chris Minns, who is now subsidising coal-fired power stations to keep the lights on.

Former staffers are flitting around NSW, convincing cockies that $10,000 a kilometre for a high-voltage transmission line over their homes and airstrip is the future, while their neighbours in Mosman wouldn’t let you pay $10,000 for a strip of their front lawn.

Kean, like federal Climate Change Minister Chris Bowen, wanted a hard, renewable reset using ideology, not strategy, to plan for an electric-only future with less effective power systems.

Once the greasers are gone, the promises are broken.

Federal Climate Change Minister Chris Bowen watches former NSW energy minster Matt Kean talking about Australia's transition to renewables. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Dan Peled

“Cows don’t sweat,” one softly-spoken farmer, who didn’t want her cattle dying in trucks, spent years explaining.

Polite and proper, she never spoke against the Clarke Creek Wind Farm that divided her central north Queensland community.

Instead, she and her husband spent years educating animal welfare to wind proponents, who played dress up in unscuffed RMs and still-crisp Akubras, that a truck with live animals on board cannot be still for more than 15 minutes.

Without airflow, they stress, on hot and humid days, the animals can die.

After years of proactively engaging, her hard work was rewarded with a kick in the face.

On Thursday, staff loaded 66 bullocks — only for them to be forced off the road for 47 minutes as oversized Squadron Energy equipment came down the range under police escort with no notice to farmers.

Numbers to contact the fly-in fly-out “engagement” people did not exist. The greasers were gone.

Two days prior, Bowen appointed Australian Energy Infrastructure Commissioner Andrew Dyer to lead a review into community engagement around the industrial installation of wind, solar and transmission lines.

Many viewed it with suspicion.

Government energy policies do not account for wind drought or wild storms. Picture: Getty Images

Amber Pedersen, a young mum fighting with Burrendong SOS and the new Central West Orana REZIST Inc, is already forced to engage simultaneously with Ark Energy’s Burrendong Wind Farm, Phoenix Pumped Hydro Station, Vestas’ Piambong Wind Farm, Uungula Wind Farm, Tilt Renewables’ prospecting hosts, EnergyCo’s current consultation to double the gigawatt power for the renewable energy zone, the NSW Department of Planning’s review of the NSW Wind Energy Guidelines, as well as investigations already lodged to Commissioner Dyer.

She wants her life back, to make a living and raise her kids, instead of being buried in project details, meetings and submissions fighting for basic rights.

Pedersen is bogged down in “engagement” with people who have no skin in the game, who will fly out as they flew in, tackling dirt roads with a hired new SUV.

There is nothing renewable about a wind factory that will provide power a third of the time, or a solar industrial installation that will provide power 11 per cent of the time, or buzzing transmission lines being built over homes without projects connecting them even approved.

These lines are to link an unaffordable, unreliable generation of power to impossible storage of power — and Australia has been sucked in because, like termites, an entire industry is working hard under the floorboards.

They haven’t accounted for winter sun being less intense than the summer sun, and all attempts to point this out are met with disdain.

They haven’t accounted for wind droughts or that Australian storms can be too fast for turbines. They ignore that wind turbines in Denmark are balanced with fossil fuels and nuclear from Sweden and Germany.

They have yet to measure how much freshwater their proposed pumped hydro plants from Borumba to Mudgee will need, and that we will be drawing water out of the environment at an unprecedented level.

And when experts on minerals and metals required for the global transition, such as Associate Professor Simon Michaux come to Canberra armed with spreadsheets to educate politicians, very few show up to listen.

Such is the spread of the grease.

The biggest losers in the short run are regional people losing their property rights in compulsory acquisition and the industrialisation of pristine bush and prime agricultural land, and the biggest losers in the long run will be the pensioners in Penrith trying to pay power bills.

Meanwhile, this weekend is the federal Nationals conference, with motions to be made for policies to push for nuclear or abolish NetZero by 2050.

And the greasers have found us here too, giving suave guarantees, this time to senators and MPs, slicking oil over troubled waters for their billionaire bosses and foreign-owned companies using feel-good, box-ticking exercises, trying to force out the pesky pro-nuclear mob who dare to seek reliable power which threaten their grift.

For many recklessly renewable ravaged communities, Commissioner Dyer could be their last sentry at the gate.

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