Pulling the plug

THE price of electricity isn’t just your monthly bill.

Heart of the nation

JIM Harper hasnÂ’t been connected to the electricity grid since 1989. His home at the end of a country lane in Crows Nest, north of Toowoomba, Queensland, gets by with a couple of solar panels connected to a battery, and a back-up generator.

There’s no need for air-con; trees are planted around the house in a way that regulates the temperature. Bore water is pumped in by a windmill. He’s a bit of a greenie, he admits, but “not a crazy one”; to him, the principles of permaculture – the harmonious integration of people with their natural environment – are plain common sense.

It’s hard to keep the industrialised world at bay, though. A few years ago an energy company put forward plans for a huge wind farm – comprising 75 turbines, with blades topping out at 120 metres – on this tight-knit farming district. Harper led the fight against it. After a year-long court battle the plans were approved, but the wind farm wasn’t built – and last December the development approval lapsed. Harper, pictured with his dog Lochie, is “quietly optimistic” that that’s an end to the matter. (The energy company, AGL, says it’s not.)

Harper doesn’t just object to wind farms on aesthetic grounds. He says they emit subsonic noise that affects the health and happiness of people living nearby. And don’t get him started on their green credentials (it’s a myth, he insists; they gobble up coal-fired power when the wind isn’t blowing). Then there’s the bigger picture. “We’re pockmarking this land with industrial problems,” he says. “We should keep everything that is smelly, dirty, ugly or noisy as far away from us as we can.”

He calls it “the tyranny of industrialisation”. His own vision of progress is the self-contained, sustainable model he inhabits. Mind you, that’s not without its problems. “Power can be a bit of a struggle,” he says. “If we put the washing machine on, or the vacuum, we’ve got to use the generator. And we can’t just buy any appliance. I was looking at laptops recently, and I picked up one and asked the shop assistant, ‘How many watts does this use?’ He looked at me like I was mad.”