China subsidies smash Australian wind tower builder, signalling end of last major player Keppel Prince

Mainland Australia’s last wind tower manufacturer will be forced to mothball its plant in a major embarrassment for Labor, after cheap imports using Chinese steel have destroyed the local industry.

Leigh Cleary, left, and Jeff Wanliss of Keppel Prince in Portland, Victoria. Picture: Alex Coppel

Mainland Australia’s last wind tower manufacturer will be forced to mothball its plant in a major embarrassment for the ­Albanese government after cheap imports using heavy-polluting Chinese steel have destroyed the local industry and cast a shadow over Labor’s domestic renewables policy.

Keppel Prince has blasted the federal and Victorian governments after a long-running lack of certainty and failure to deal with heavily subsidised Asian steel imports forced the Portland-based manufacturer to close its wind tower manufacturing facility, once one of the nation’s biggest.

Keppel Prince executive director Stephen Garner singled out Climate Change Minister Chris Bowen for criticism, saying he had been to the plant and was well aware of the challenges facing local producers who are competing with China, where there are generous subsidies for producers that have crippled Australian competitors.

The local wind tower manufacturing industry has been destroyed by cheap imports.

Local Liberal MP Dan Tehan said the government’s Made in Australia policy was “failing before their eyes”.

Mr Garner said the company was the biggest remaining operator in Australia and the last on the mainland, but the local industry faced impossible cost barriers that state and federal government had not addressed.

The company has been in talks with the NSW and Queensland governments over potential future projects but Mr Garner said there needed to be commitments to provide guaranteed 60 per cent local input to any project.

Asked where the Prime Minister and Mr Bowen fit in the closure, Mr Garner said: “They’ve got to look really bad that they are losing the only tower manufacturer accredited to build the things.

“The federal government continues to say, like Albanese says, we want to get back to manufacturing. Here we have a manufacturing facility already in place.

“It’s set up for renewable energy, which is what the government talks about every day of the week, and yet we’ve got to mothball it because we can’t compete with China because our government won’t do anything about it.

“It’s just so disappointing that the government is doing literally nothing to stop China from dumping into Australia.’’

At its peak, the Keppel Prince wind tower plant had 150 workers, with hundreds more indirect jobs, but that number has dwindled dramatically over time, particularly after the onset of the pandemic and, earlier, due to the disruption of the Global Financial Crisis.

Mr Tehan said the government’s pledge to build Australia’s manufacturing base was in disarray. “What a complete embarrassment,’’ the member for Wannon said. “Their renewables only policy has been such a success it has closed our last remaining wind tower manufacturer.

“So the government is not in breach of its own misinformation and disinformation laws, it needs to immediately pull its Made in Australia ads that proudly displays a wind farm.

“It would actually be funny, if workers weren’t losing their jobs because of such incompetence.’’

The company still has a major presence in the seaside town in southwest Victoria, particularly in relation to the Alcoa smelter, but the federal government was told this week of the decision to mothball the wind tower operation, which had helped kickstart the Australian industry.

Mr Garner said there were potentially thousands of local jobs waiting to be created across Australia with the projected strong ongoing demand for wind power in the renewables sector. He also warned there were towers already erected that would struggle to meet safety or quality standards because they were imported from overseas with low-quality building techniques or steel.

Keppel Prince is building a training tower for a West Australian university, and then is due to close in March, shuttering the work site with the loss of about a dozen jobs.

The company builds the wind towers but the blades and turbines are imported, often from Europe. He said NSW and Queensland both needed a wind tower factory because of the looming huge demand over the next 20 years.

There has been demand for towers built with Chinese, South Korean and Vietnamese steel because of its relative thrift, particularly Chinese towers.

“All the people are using the Chinese (towers). They want to import the things because it’s cheaper. But the quality is no good,’’ Mr Garner said.

He also said the Victorian government, which has embraced renewables, had failed to follow through with contracts in recent years, making it even harder to survive.

At one point, Mr Garner had considered Chinese steel but it was being offered at double the price of that being given to his overseas competitors.

“For many, many years I feel like I’ve been the pied piper,’’ he said. “I’ve been standing on a soap box preaching this for so long, that China has been subsidised. We know that (in) China the government gives a 12 per cent subsidy for every tower that they export.

“And if that’s not dumping, then what is?’’

Keppel Prince’s factory is near the Southern Ocean offshore wind zone, where the Albanese government has flagged a 5000sq km wind energy area from Warrnambool in Victoria’s southwest to Port MacDonnell in South Australia’s lower southeast. But the process of building these offshore projects is complex and potentially out of reach of local producers, with both logistical and capacity questions, including how to transport the giant towers.

Victoria has set a target of 95 per cent renewable energy by 2035 but this appears almost certain to be built by sucking in imports.