In South West Victoria, sixth generation cattle farmer Michael Greenham has lived with powerline towers on his farm for 40 years. He says poor communication – not the infrastructure itself – is why new transmission projects face community opposition in rural Australia.
With powerlines set to be built across the country to support Australia’s new energy grid, figuring out the best way to work with these communities is paramount.
What’s changed? Despite population growth and an increase in services, Australia’s energy demand has been relatively flat for the last few decades. But the nation’s ageing coal fired power stations are reaching the end of their lives. The country needs a new form of energy to fill the gap.
Why now? According to the CSIRO’s annual economic report that estimates the cost of building new electricity generation, the cheapest new way to generate electricity is renewable energy, like wind and solar, supported by battery storage.
Another impact: Greenham said he’s been able to run his cattle farm with little interference from having the lines around, but mentioned for other farms it might not be as easy.
🗣️ “The other impact I suppose was if we wanted to cultivate, which we don't do that much of, would have impacted that. But essentially The towers became rubbing posts for the cattle and even provided a little bit of shade sometimes. So yeah, we've coped.”
There are examples of crop farming being done successfully while under powerlines, like this farm in Horsham, VIC.
Can we just not do it? The Grattan Institute's Alison Reeve told the National Account maintaining the country's current energy system – and prolonging the life of coal fired power plants – would only keep power bills higher.
🗣️“The climate's changed as well… we are getting more frequent storms, more frequent freak weather events and so on, which means that our existing transmission network is also falling over more often because it was not built to deal with that kind of wind or that kind of hail or that sort of heat and so on”,” said Reeve.
“It’s like having an old car, it just tends to break down at unexpected and inconvenient points and it gets to the point where you're having to spend more to keep it going than it's actually worth. And so that's kind of what's happening with our coal generators at the moment.”
One thing that’s gone wrong: Reeve said one problem with the rollout of renewable energy and accompanying powerlines has been poor communication.
She said projects like VNI West in Victoria, which will connect renewable energy projects in both New South Wales and Victoria, had been planned for years, but publicly available information was not communicated with the communities where it was actually going to be.
“They found out about it a lot later”, said Reeve. “They found out about it in a way that was potentially just a transmission company coming along and going, ‘I am going to put this line through here’.”
“So that was the wrong way to do it, right? And this is something that the sector needs to get much better at is communicating and working with those host communities”.
Reeve also said many Victorians’ experience during the pandemic resulted in a lack of trust in the government.
“That happened to manifest around a bunch of transmission line projects because those were the projects that came along that could just as easily have been about a railway line or a bridge or resuming land for a road or whatever it is”, said Reeve.
Why is there opposition?
Cattle farmer Greenham thinks poor communication on plans, as well as more private companies being involved with building power lines, has led to some public distrust.
🗣️“Because it's private enterprise and because there's a sort of political divide almost for the sake of creating a divide, I think that makes the process far more difficult to accept; for landholders to accept. And certainly the political opposition – sometimes it's brought about simply to create difference rather than look at what could be of benefit to all of us.”
A solution?
At the end of the day, it’s the farmers that actually understand what’s going on and what’s do-able on their land,
Reeve said the transmission companies need to work with them as much as possible.
“It's so easy to just draw a straight line on a map and not actually understand what's going on underneath that”.
Watch the full interview below:
Thumbnail: AAP