Renewable energy transition is cutting through prime farmland
Australia’s transition to renewable energy is slicing through prime farmland, and cutting to the heart of rural communities.
Golden fields of canola, tilled by his sons Alistair and Angus, capture the view to the left from John Kelly’s veranda. To the right, his prized Marocara Dorset flock can be seen grazing off in the distance.
For almost a century, the Kelly family has worked and nurtured the rich agricultural plains of Wongarbon, near Wellington in central west NSW; each generation investing blood, sweat and tears to leave their beloved farm, Hillview, more productive and sustainable for the next.
At 82, Kelly, whose grandfather established the farm in 1925, imagined he would be slowing down about now and enjoying the fruits of a lifetime’s labour, proud that the fourth generation of Kellys are at the helm.
Instead, he’s rolling up his sleeves and squaring up for a fight, because the abundant fields surrounding Hillview and its wider region, may soon be home to thousands of black metal solar panels and towering wind turbines.
With a global race towards net zero and low-emissions energy production, governments and power companies are scrambling to create renewable energy generation and transmission capability.
Along the east coast of Australia, from Tasmania to Queensland, plans are in place for renewable energy zones and infrastructure projects that will turn thousands of hectares of prime agricultural land over to large-scale wind and solar farms – and the transmission towers and cables needed to support them.
While some applaud the arrival of the green energy transformation, others say the impacts are dire.
“At my age, I should be retiring, not going in to battle, I shouldn’t be worrying about this but it does keep me awake at night,” says Kelly, whose farm is in the Central-West Orana Renewable Energy Zone.
“Only 4 per cent of Australia is arable land, too much good farming land is being lost and the farmers are being ignored.
“It has caused lot of tension in the community; families that have been friends all their lives no longer speak to one another, but no one in any position of authority seems to care, it’s very sad.
“We must fight, it’s a matter of principle.”
‘IT WAS BLOODY WINDY’
Outside Wellington in NSW, just east of Kelly’s farm, Simon Barton’s property is now home to 10 of a 33-turbine wind farm, and he couldn’t be happier.
In the early 2000s, drought sucked the life and the income from the Bartons’ beloved property, Glen Oak, which has been in the family since 1930. Over the years, Simon’s father, John, and his father before that, built up a successful mixed-farming enterprise, rotating crops and livestock. However, like many in the region, the lingering drought took its toll and they began to look for other ways to generate income.
“I’ve lived here all my life and some days it was bloody windy,” Simon says. “So windy, it felt like it’d almost push you back in the front door. I had been thinking for quite a while that we needed to make use of that resource somehow but I was probably a bit too lazy, or didn’t know where to go for information and advice about what we should do.
“The drought really inspired us to look further and lo and behold as we were contemplating it, a company approached us. They had an old paper map and they’d been looking around the area and identified us as a suitable site for a wind farm, so we started the conversation.”
Today, the Bartons are largely running a livestock enterprise but with cattle and sheep prices plummeting the wind turbines and the substation they host are a financial lifeline, and will generate the bulk of their income for the coming year, while feeding clean energy back into the Bodangora Wind Farm grid, which powers about 64,000 homes.
“When we started looking into this, we were considered early adopters, it was to some extent experimental technology but it ticked all the boxes for us and made a great deal of sense and it’s worked out well. We’ve had minimal disruption to the farm and the wind turbines give us financial stability going forward for the next generation. The company is contributing a significant amount of money each year to the local community, and really, why wouldn’t you do something to help the environment? It’s a win-win.”
WESTERN RENEWABLES LINK
In 2022 the Australian government legislated their Net Zero 2050 plan, effectively supercharging the push towards renewable energy.
In NSW the government identified five Renewable Energy Zones where clusters of large-scale solar and wind farms are being constructed, the first of which is the Central-West Orana Zone near Wellington, along with the proposed $5 billion HumeLink transmission project, connecting the Snowy 2.0 pumped hydro project to the NSW grid.
The Queensland government is following suit with 12 potential renewable energy zones identified across the sunshine state, while Tasmania has identified its North West region as a renewable energy zone.
Arguably, the most contentious of these projects is the Western Renewables Link running 190km west from the outskirts of Melbourne to Bulgana, near Ararat, and the Victoria-NSW Interconnector West, a 400km path connecting the powerlines at Bulgana to a grid near Jerilderie in NSW. Both projects will require large swathes of land to transmit energy from wind and solar farms back to the city, and currently they are proposed to run through some of the state’s most productive agricultural holdings.
Up and down the east coast, landowners have voiced concerns about amenity, accelerated fire, environmental and biodiversity risks, and the loss of food-producing land, but the social impacts are just as pervasive. Communities are bitterly divided between those who’ve willingly chosen to host solar and wind farms to reap the benefits, and those who’ve been compulsorily lumped with infrastructure to support them.
“The health and mental health issues on the community have been devastating,” says Emma Muir, whose Myrniong farm in is the crosshairs of Victoria’s Western Renewable Link.
“This has already taken a huge toll and this project is nowhere near finished, we might still have years of fighting ahead of us.”
On June 5, 2020, Emma and her husband, Peter, received a phone call out of the blue from a land access agent for AusNet Services, keen to discuss a proposed “powerline” in the area. They quickly discovered this was in fact a 500-kilovolt transmission line with 80-metre-tall towers (that require 90-metre easements) running across their top paddock and in front of their home.
They haven’t slept a night since.
“What irks us most is that there is no social licence to build this project, there’s no community involvement, we were never engaged in this process and the whole thing has been handled appallingly,” says Muir, who formed the Moorabool and Central Highlands Power Alliance with neighbours to fight back. They have a case before the Supreme Court.
The Muir family has been farming at Myrniong, near Ballarat, since 1869, and Emma and Peter are the fifth generation to work this fertile stretch of land, running a mixed enterprise of livestock and crops. They say the WRL will destroy their farm and livelihood. “AusNet have put a price on our lives and our livelihoods but no amount of money will protect us from the threat of bushfire, save our farms from devastation or stop the loss of precious landscapes,” Muir says.
“It’s impossible to get an honest answer from anyone about the true nature and impacts of it.”
Victorian Energy Policy Centre director Professor Bruce Mountain is scathing of the WRL and VNI projects. He says that while solar and wind energy generation is the way of the future, this project is a disaster for landholders and the broader community.
“If developed, this will be the biggest single expense in the Victorian transmission system in more than 50 years and the biggest mistake in transmission planning in living memory,” he says.
“We don’t argue with the government’s policy objectives, we need to find a substitute for coal, even leaving aside the climate issues, our coal generators are on their last legs, but this plan is going to fail badly.
“The transmission lines consume enormous tracts of land, and you need to have a jolly good argument before you go consuming valuable productive land, secondly it’s a huge amount of money that needs to be financed and that costs consumers who need to fund it, and thirdly, it’s just unnecessary and it’s not going to augment the transmission system anywhere near what’s needed.”
Professor Mountain argues that technology being offered is already outdated. He says renewable energy generation needs to be close to urban areas, not created elsewhere and transmitted hundreds of kilometres, and current tech such as battery storage makes large-scale power lines and proposed interconnectors redundant.
“The underlying mindset of this project is all wrong and the engineering doesn’t stack up,” he says. “Battery tech is already available, it’s a matter of installing it.
“The government can play a role with incentives for storage, and properly accounting for local impacts by focussing on our tremendous opportunity to upgrade existing capacity rather than consuming new land.”
National Farmers’ Federation president David Jochinke is a third-generation grain and livestock farmer in northwest Victoria. Jochinke hosts six wind turbines on his property, part of the Murra Warra Wind Farm, which is Australia’s largest and generates about 434 megawatts of electricity from 100 turbines spread across multiple properties near Horsham. While his experience with wind farms has been largely positive, he says the level of community engagement on recent renewable projects has been poor.
“The National Farmers’ Federation is very disappointed that farmers are the last ones to be brought into these discussions, they should be the first ones engaged with. There needs to be a huge rethink from government and the energy organisations about the way they’ve engaged with the farming community,” Jochinke says. “Any infrastructure must minimise the impact on agricultural land. Victoria has large tracts of Crown land that could be utilised. Taking high quality, productive land shouldn’t be an option, it just doesn’t make sense.”
VNI West project director Sam Magee says the regulator recognises that landholders have been dissatisfied with community engagement, and the organisation is “listening to feedback and adjusting in response”.
“Developing new transmission lines that will deliver low-cost renewable energy to offset coal-plant retirements is challenging, with no new transmission built in regional Victoria for generations,” Magee says. “We want to deliver a project with the best outcomes for landholders, local communities and all Victorians.”
WIND FARM OR COAL MINE?
John Kelly has just returned from a trip to the UK, ticking off a bucket-list visit to the home of his prized Marocara Dorsets. Angus and Alistair have just had a successful ram sale and they’re looking forward to hosting agronomic trials, as they’ve done for the past 45 years. John hopes that he’ll be looking over fields of canola, wheat and sheep, not solar panels, for a long time to come.
“There’s so many questions that need to be answered, some say there’s the potential for metals from the solar panels to leach into the ground, the water run off may cause soil erosion and possible salinity issues, there’s potential insurance issues for landholders,” he says.
“And the wind towers are almost as high as the Centrepoint Tower is Sydney. No one can give us answers as to what impact these will have in 10 or 20 years, particularly how they will affect the quality of the soil long-term.
“I’m very proud of what we have achieved here and to turn it over to solar panels would be an absolute disgrace. When the farmers have raised our concerns, we’ve been ignored.
The politicians don’t care, they’ll be long gone in a few years, we are the ones left to worry about the future. There’s plenty of rough country west of here that could be used, put the solar panels out there. We have some of the best country in NSW, with heavy black soils that have been in production for the last 100 years. We must look after it and protect it.”
For Simon Barton, the wind turbines have secured the future of the family farm for the next generation and beyond.
“Originally the lifespan of the project was to be 25 years, but it looks like we’ll be extending it. The wind turbines offer security for the kids if they want to take it on. It also means we don’t have to run the farm as hard as we would have in the past so we can de-stock and let the farm regenerate,” he says.
“I say to people, would you rather live next to a wind farm or a coal mine? Power has to come from somewhere. We want to work with nature rather than against it, it just makes sense.”
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