Show notes
This week we discuss Australia's recent cancellation of wind projects due to political changes and community opposition, the complexities of grid interconnects, and the need for strategic renewable energy planning.
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You are listening to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast brought to you by build turbines.com. Learn, train, and be a part of the Clean Energy Revolution. Visit build turbines.com today. Now here's your hosts, Allen Hall, Joel Saxum, Phil Totaro, and Rosemary Barnes.
Well, welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. I am Allen Hall and I'm here with Rosemary Barnes, who's fresh from. Sweden, she just traveled all around the world to record this episode. Uh, Phil Totaro is out in California and Joel Saxum is up in the cold north of Wisconsin. And we, we've been just discussing off air. All the craziness has been happening in the wind industry.
And I, I have to admit, you know, I thought last week was. Insane. Well, we just, uh, put it on steroids. So not only are we canceling a lot of projects in the United States currently, we're all, we're starting to be cancel [00:01:00] them on Australia and over in Queensland. The Queensland Deputy Premier, uh, has used his ministerial powers to refuse planning approval for the moonlight range when Farm Near Rock Hampton.
Now I, and I'm sure I murdered that name Rosemary, so please forgive me, but it was gonna have 88 turbines in about 450 megawatts of capacity, enough to power about a quarter million homes in Australia and tied with, it's about 300 construction jobs and 10 permanent positions to make that wind farm go.
But there's was like a two month public consultation period that happened. And during that consultation period, about 80 per 90% of the local residents, and when I say local residents are about 150 local residents, uh, replied back and were concerned about some of the, the known people that are gonna be there because it's gonna like double the population, right.
And 300 construction workers in a, an area of 140 people, 150 people. Uh, and based on [00:02:00] that boom, perhaps the, the project was canceled. What is happening in Queensland that we need to understand that projects just kinda get wiped away like that with 140 people, 150 people chiding in.
Rosemary Barnes: So what's happened is that the Queensland government, the Queensland State Government, it was labor for quite a while and they had, uh, renewables targets and net zero targets and stuff like that.
And then, um, the government changed last year, so now there's a, a liberal government, which means conservative in Australia. They're in power and they wanted to change their planning regulations. But what is a bit weird is that they wanna do it retroactively. So they've changed the rules in April, and now they're going through projects that have already been approved to see if they meet the new rules rather than the rules at the time that they were approved.
But the weirdest thing is that I'm pretty sure that this specific wind farm that they revoked, they were the ones to approve it shortly after [00:03:00] they came into government. They approved this wind farm and then they changed the rules a few months later, and then they did a new round of community consultation.
Um. And they say that 85% of local residents were, um, you know, in favor of reassessing. The issue is that now we're at this stage of the energy transition where, you know, we're up over 40% renewables across Australia. Um, that's primarily wind and solar. We're getting to the point now where we kind of, you can't just add things as they're convenient and easy.
You have to get a bit more strategic. Think about the whole energy system. I was looking forward to that coming online because it will make the whole system more robust and less, um, yeah, less fluctuations. You know, it would really even things out quite a lot to have, um, a lot of that Queensland wind in the mix.
So it will be a, a real shame and a, a problem for, uh, the whole of the Australian East Coast Grid. If Queensland opts out of any more wind energy.
Speaker 4: But once [00:04:00] they approve these plans, it sort of, you have to think about the grid as an entity and unplugging some capacity. There does have consequences further down the transmission line in this case.
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, but each, each state has responsibility if they're interconnected, but each space, each state has responsibility that they are gonna be okay regardless of what, they can't control what the other states do. So. Every, um, every state has to make sure that they are okay on their own, and they are, they are planning for that, you know.
Um, so yeah, like Victoria's got, got a lot of plans for, for batteries and interconnectors and stuff, and, uh. I mean, new South Wales is building renewable energy zones. Everyone's got their own plans moving ahead. It would've, it would've made the whole job easier. But you know, like any interconnector, um, or yeah, interconnection between two, two grids, you can't, like, you kind of, you plan for it, but you can't, you have to also plan for the scenario where that interconnection goes down or you, you know, [00:05:00]um, whatever reason you might not get the energy that you plan on from the other states.
So. It is a tricky, tricky aspect I think of planning.
Joel Saxum: Mir. Lemme ask you a question, and this is popping into my head right now because it's basically political games between parties and these kind of things. And normally we don't talk politics on the show and we try to stay away from that. And I'm going to, I'm gonna skirt it.
But a couple months ago I, when I was uh, down, I was invited to testify the Texas Senate and I was uh, always amazed. The lack of technical knowledge in the room, right? There's these people setting their chain. They're, they're putting bills forward, they're putting things, doing things that really affect the general populace, but their knowledge base is coming from like their chief of staff and their chief of staff is a political science major, and that person is just googling whatever.
They want to see in the bill, so they're putting things out that just didn't make sense. Right. When it comes to Australian [00:06:00] politics, is it the same kind of stuff? Is it more of just like these political arguments versus the technical ones, or how do they get information into these decisions? Because this decision to me just seems like.
It seems like it's not based in, in scientific fact or scientific method around anything. It's just like, oh, we don't like these things. Let's get rid of 'em.
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. I don't think it's trying to be based. They're not, they're not even the, yeah, the government is not trying to say that it's based on any kind of science or anything they're saying that it, you know, they're mostly citing things that community consultation.
Um, so you know, it's more about people's feelings, which is, you know, a valid, a valid thing. I was listening to a podcast about Texas, actually, I'm halfway through it still, um, about what's going on there with, um, some of their proposals to, you know, require everybody to have a hundred percent firming for each individual project.
And I do think that Texas is trying really hard to, uh, you know, like, um, to, to, you know, they've got, you've got a pretty flexible system and allow, you know, [00:07:00] um, uh. And allow companies to make their own decisions about how, you know, what kind of energy sources they're gonna have and how they're gonna make money and let the market take care of it to a certain extent.
And it's really similar to the Australian electricity market as well. They're, um, they are, they do share a common basis and some of the same people worked on the, um, market design of both of them. But I feel like Texas is trying as hard as possible to intervene to make sure that none of the, you can get none of the benefits and all of the disadvantages of a system like that.
So. That is a bit interesting,
Speaker 4: but at some point, Rosemary, and maybe we'll talk about this after the break, maybe that's the thing to do, is to talk about this after the break. It takes so long to get projects approved because of the interconnect that this engineers have to go back and look, make sure if this is going to work, how do they connect this energy source into the grid?
How do they make it work in the United States? And I want, I want want to get over the break here. I want to talk to Phil about this. We spent all this time doing the engineering work and then all of a sudden, poof, it's gone. What [00:08:00] is the point of doing all the engineering work? Engineering? If at a moment's notice you can yank this project,
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Today,
Speaker 4: Phil, explain what is happening on the interconnect and why it takes so long to get projects approved and all the in supposedly because of engineering, it takes a long time to understand what effect of adding a 500 megawatts will do to a grid.