Bunch of hot air
The wind has blown both ways when it comes to discussing renewable energy options. Here’s the becalmed truth on this much-maligned sector.
AusBiz Magazine - Oct/Nov 2019
Words: Ian Lloyd Neubauer
Temporal lakes, forested ridges and wide flat country bathed in soft pastel colours. These were the views enjoyed by people commuting between Sydney and Canberra on the Hume Highway for more than 100 years.
But shortly after Labor won its last federal election in 2007, the landscape changed with the erection of dozens of massive wind turbines – high-vis proof Labor was keeping their promise to ensure at least 20 per cent of Australia’s electricity supply would be generated by renewables by 2020.
“This is necessary to protect jobs into the future and also necessary to protect our environment into the future,” Prime Minister Kevin Rudd said at the time.
Attack of the clones
Fast-forward to 2014. Federal Labor is back in the Opposition and the wind turbines on the Hume Highway are making headlines again – for all the wrong reasons.
“I drive to Canberra to go to Parliament and I must say I find those wind turbines around Lake George to be utterly offensive,” Treasurer Joe Hockey told Macquarie Radio. “I think they’re just a blight on the landscape.”
Hockey’s then-boss, PM Tony Abbott, followed through with a one-two punch combination. “When I’ve been up close to these things, not only are they visually awful, but they make a lot of noise,” he told broadcaster Alan Jones, who then alluded wind turbines can cause health problems like insomnia, headaches, dizziness, nausea, exhaustion, anxiety, irritability and depression.
Later Jones also repeated a claim that wind farming was flawed because the wind doesn’t blow all the time. “No matter how romantic [modern industrial people] are, they don’t want to return to pre-modern life. I mean, what are you going to do? Live in the dark?” he asked listeners, reminding them yet again that the push for sustainable energy sources would increase the size of their power bills.
All these claims are, of course, a bunch of hot air. The utility companies that provide us with power don’t rely on a single electricity source; instead, they use a mix of natural gas, coal, wind, solar and hydroelectric. So, if the wind doesn’t blow on Wednesday, we won’t be left in the dark on Thursday.
On the health front, 25 different studies – including a 2015 review by Australia’s peak medical research body, the NHMRC – have found no evidence wind farms cause adverse health effects. Yet there is ample evidence linking the particulate pollution from coal plants to heart disease, respiratory problems and cancer.
And while electricity generated by emerging technologies like wind and solar power costs more than coal or gas, that’s only because there’s no level playing field in Australia.
A 2013 report by think tank The Australia Institute found Canberra gives the mining industry $4 billion in subsidies annually, while state governments offer their own subsidies. And if you factor in the cost of air pollution created by burning fossil fuels with something like a carbon tax, wind farming becomes the cheapest source of electricity on the market.
Not in my backyard
Nevertheless, the writing appeared on the wall for wind farming when Hockey issued his rant.
Installed capacity – the maximum output of electricity that a generator can produce under ideal conditions – increased by only 10 per cent between 2013 to 2016 compared to 56 per cent in the two previous decades.
In 2017 wind farming took another beating when it was falsely blamed for causing statewide power outages in South Australia after supercell tornadoes crumpled 23 major transmission towers.
The culture war in which wind farms have been caught up is best summed up by a mock crowdfunding petition to erect wind turbines on Sydney’s Northern Beaches, where Tony Abbott lost his long-held federal seat of Warringah to climate change warrior Zali Steggall in the May 2019 federal election.
“It’s only fair that the wake votes in Warringah put up these monstrosities, like those of us who live out in the bonnies do,” commented Mike Trigs, one of 24,000 Australians who signed the petition.
But according to Shlomi Bonet, an environmental scientist and farmer who lives 2.5 kilometres from Cullerin Range (one of eight actual or proposed wind farms in the Southern Tablelands of New South Wales), having a wind farm in your neighbourhood is no big deal.
“What amazed me was the way we were bombarded with so much anti-wind information by lobbyists during the consultation stage,” he says. “I know it sounds like a conspiracy, but I swear they were paid by coal companies; there’s no other reason why someone would say so many bad things about wind farms – noise, vibrations and shadow flickers. I’ve stood right under a wind turbine and felt the flicker. It did not bother me.
“What the wind farm did cause was a lot of friction in the community, because the family who has the turbines on their land, they get $5000 a year for each turbine and there are 26 of them, while the rest of the community only got half a million dollars, which we used to build a park and hall,” Bonet says.
“And the people who live right next door to the turbines are very bitter. They got a few perks like free Foxtel for life because they lost their TV reception, and double glazing for their windows to block out the noise. I’ve been to their homes and admit the noise can be bad. But again, if you compare it to living next door to a coal power station, well, you really can’t compare the two.”
Winds are changing
Despite the campaign to stop wind farming in Australia, the industry has proven unstoppable. In South Australia, 41 per cent of its power is generated by wind. In Victoria, the figure stands at 25 per cent, while the national average is brushing 7 per cent – almost the same quantity generated by hydropower.
But thanks to exponential leaps in wind turbine technology, wind farming is on track to becoming Australia’s biggest generator of sustainable energy within a few short years. There are currently 94 wind farms in Australia with another 24 either under construction or formally approved that will boost combined output by a third when they come online.
The not-in-my-backyard phenomena will persist, but could be mitigated by strategies used in Denmark and Germany, like community sharing of rental incomes, free electricity or degrees of local ownership of wind farms.
But we can also expect to see more anti-wind scaremongering by populist leaders who use the strategy to lure disenfranchised voters.
“Windmills, wheeeee,” US President Donald Trump said during a rally in March 2019. “And if it doesn’t blow, you can forget about television for that night. Darling, I want to watch television. I’m sorry – the wind isn’t blowing!”
DID YOU KNOW?
Wind turbines reduce the number of fires started by lightning strikes by safely conducting the lightning to earth.
The first practical windmills were in use in Sistan, a region of Iran bordering Afghanistan, in the 9th century.
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