In Europe when it comes to planning approvals for wind and solar energy the authorities recognise an “overriding public interest” for large scale renewables and is creating dedicated ‘acceleration areas’ to fast-track projects.
Right now Australia’s target of 82 per cent renewable generation electricity grid by the end of 2030 is looking like an endangered species, in large part because of planning approval failure in the biggest state, New South Wales (but also in other parts of the country).
This was made absolutely clear at last week’s Large-Scale Renewable Generation and Storage Summit in Sydney by Smart Energy Council chief executive of John Grimes in a gritty opening address. A series of speakers and panellists echoed the sentiment, citing a slow and falling record for project approvals.
The scenario points to a wider can of worms for all states and territories, and federal law as well, especially the unresolved weaknesses of the Commonwealth’s overarching Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act, which was portrayed as a ponderous regulatory place where renewables projects go to die.
Above all, the EPBC needs a climate trigger to put the defence of the planetary climatic system, the primary life support for both human and natural ecosystems, above site by site factors like birds and bats, and local, visual and audibility amenity for that matter.
With highly relevant NSW government officials in the audience and on speaker panels, Grimes was blunt in his critique, declaring that “the planning rules in NSW are written to allow projects to be shut down”.
This in turn was being exploited to stop renewable energy projects, with the same tactics being exported to other jurisdictions and was being weaponised politically to alienate local communities.
Right on cue, at the weekend just past, and three days after the summit, former Nationals’ leader Barnaby Joyce, a dedicated friend of fossil fuels, went right over the top with public comments at an anti-offshore wind rally at Lake Illawarra, near Wollongong.
Joyce, who has since publicly apologised amid calls for his sacking from the position frontbench, told the protest crowd that their ‘greatest weapon’ was turning up in Sydney and Canberra, respectively the seats of government for the state and the nation. Torturing the weapon analogy, he then added. “And the bullet you have is a little piece of paper, it goes in the magazine called the voting box.”
Also right on cue, on Monday this week, four days after the summit, the news came that a major wind farm proposed for the New England Renewable Energy Zone of NSW, near Armidale, was being shelved by its developer proponents, apparently because a ”change of mind” from landholders had impacted on its viability. It’s likely no coincidence that the now defunct project is in Barnaby Joyce’s electorate, New England, and he’s very clearly no friend of big renewables.
With national elections to be held by May 2025 at the latest, and the coalition opposition putting a pivot to nuclear power at the centre of its energy and climate policy, along with restricting renewables, prolonging coal and expanding gas, the stakes couldn’t be higher.
Back at the summit Grimes had come armed with facts and figures to back up his arguments about planning failure in NSW, including:
Planning approval times:
- Queensland: 1-2 years
- South Australia:1-3 years
- NSW: 5-8 years (and while we were starting to see improvements, and solar farms were better, it was “still a joke”)
Planning application costs:
- Queensland: $30,000-$40,000
- Victoria: starting around $100,000
- NSW: starting around $1 million and a 1.5GW project around $4.5 million
When this is happening in the state that represents about 40 per cent of the national economy and is central to the multi-jurisdiction National Electricity Market (NEM), then it’s obviously a case of “Houston, we have a problem!”.
So how do we solve this? The answer to that depends on who you are asking, and there’s no single magic bullet.
Grimes, like many others, sees a massive economic opportunity for Australia in a renewables-led energy transition, one which goes far beyond merely ‘keeping the lights on’, but which is being deliberately slowed and hampered due to a weak and compromised planning system, especially in NSW. Part of his immediate prescription to resolve this is to give big renewable projects state significant infrastructure status, thus bypassing standard planning processes.
Tilt Renewables’ Jonathan Upson stressed the need to recognise and consider the net environmental benefits of renewables to expedite planning decisions. Upson pointed to the European Union (EU) and its Renewables Energy Directive, which underpins an EU-wide target of 45 per cent renewable energy by 2030, driven in large part by Russia’s war on Ukraine cutting gas supplies.
It’s worth looking at how the EU is framing its prioritisation of renewables. Under the heading of faster permits for projects, this source shows what the EU is aiming at:
Member states will design renewables acceleration areas where renewable energy projects will undergo simplified and fast permit-granting processes. Renewable energy deployment will also be presumed to be of ‘overriding public interest’, which will limit the grounds of legal objections to new installations.
NSW government representative Chloe Hicks, executive director for strategy and policy at EnergyCo, was understandably defensive of the government’s work and trajectory, and especially the Renewable Energy Zones (RZEs) it is developing to focus the combination of new large-scale wind, solar, battery and pumped hydro developments with the expansion of the transmission infrastructure.
Hicks recalled how when she started working in the government’s energy division a decade ago there were no solar farms in NSW and only a few wind farms. Now, she said, there were 35 solar farms and 17 wind farms.
With a clear stay the course message, Hicks spelt out the RZE strategy, which the current NSW government inherited, and willingly adopted, from the previous government, saying: “RZEs are all about overcoming the chicken and egg thing about renewables and transmission.”
To be fair, Grimes, amid his criticisms, described the RZEs as being “great in concept”, but in practice a “dead weight” on renewables progress.
While they guaranteed transmission access for wind and solar farm projects, this was being clawed back with access fees of $1700 per MW each year, a fee not payable outside of an RZE, with implementation “taking forever”.
For renewables investor Oliver Yates, a former CEO of the Clean Energy Finance Corporation, it’s price rather than planning which should be the key determinant of where renewables are deployed, and how quickly. As he sees it, big government set pieces like RZEs and offshore wind zones are too expensive when the energy sector is being transformed in real-time by extraordinary falling costs for technologies, predominantly solar panels and lithium ion batteries.
After speaking at the summit, where he argued the new maximum benchmark for dispatchable electricity is $200 megawatt an hour, made up of $65 MW/h for solar and $135MWh for batteries, and that paying more for anything else is “ridiculous”, Yates followed up on LinkedIn, saying:
Given persistent low daytime prices and plummeting battery prices the traditional concept of solar power is dead. Now all utility scale solar will be dispatched solar. When will sensible state governments start reverse auctions for dispatchable solar on existing transmission infrastructure and we can accelerate this transition? We don’t need expensive REZs or offshore wind in NSW that will drive up prices, we just need the government to do the maths.
To give John Grimes the last word, he took the summit audience back to 2008 when he was joining the renewables sector, and then Australian Greens Senator Christine Milne gave clean energy industry players a verbal blast, calling them “chicken shits”. He warned that nuclear was a distraction, the current pushback against renewables was all about gas, which remained very powerful as an industry lobby, and that the still-emerging sector he represents can’t afford to “fight among ourselves, given that “market share is always taken, it is never shared”.
“We’re still small, but we are the energy system, and it’s time we started to act like it.”
