Wind & solar colonisation of Aboriginal lands won’t be tolerated

Former Chief Scientist Dr Alan Finkel has written a new book outlining how Australia can transition to a wind and solar powered future. In the introduction he outlines his vision of Australia’s future as follows:

“Think forests of wind farms carpeting hills and cliffs from sea to sky. Think endless arrays of solar panels disappearing like a mirage into the desert. What we have now has to be scaled up by a factor of twenty. It will take mining on a massive scale to extract the minerals needed for batteries and solar panels. It will take giant factories to build the parts for towering wind turbines. It will take untold miles of high-voltage transmission lines to carry the electricity to power the mines and factories and the 24-hour buzz of civilisation. It will take engagement with and support for affected communities; financing at an unprecedented scale.”?

Finkel is a supporter of energy transition. And, to his credit, he’s moved past reciting the mantra that “the science” requires it, to outlining practical steps and consequences.

But his vision leaves many questions. And it’s one I don’t believe will be acceptable to most Australians or to the traditional owners of much of the land and sea to be carpeted over.?

Finkel rejects nuclear power believing it’s not realistic in Australia before 2040 by which time he’s confident we won’t need it.

I believe this confidence is misplaced. A key factor in the timing of transitioning to wind and solar is building new transmission lines. In an interview on 3AW in June, former CEO of the Australian Energy Council, Matthew Warren, said Australia has already used up the existing grid infrastructure’s capacity for new renewables and needs to build out the grid with 10,000 km of new transmission lines into remote Australia. This will connect the wind and solar carpet in Finkel’s vision to the grid. But Warren also said we can only build 500-600 km of transmission lines per year and it’s not simple or realistic to speed this up. This takes us to 2040 to 2043 at the earliest.?

The fact is it will likely take much longer than expected. One factor in the delay of Snowy 2.0 is the considerable opposition to new overhead transmission lines through Kosciuszko National Park. I believe there’ll be objections across the entirety of the 10,000 km of new lines and demands to put them underground, where feasible, but at 4 to 10 times greater cost. By contrast, nuclear plants could be built on the sites of decommissioned coal plants already connected to the grid.?

Finkel has cited the International Energy Agency’s estimate that reaching net zero by 2050, requires annual investment globally to more than triple by 2030 to US$4 trillion per year, for a total of $US100 trillion by 2050, but he dismisses this as capital investment that will generate returns and reduce annual expenditure on fossil fuels.?

But much of the capital invested into carpeting Australia with wind turbine forests and solar power arrays will need to be found again and again because wind and solar plants have a much shorter lifespan than baseload power alternatives and their lifespan in practice tends to be shorter than promised. No sooner than the carpet is laid, we’ll be scrambling to extract no less than 24 separate minerals required to build its replacement (including 220 tonnes of coal required to build each new wind turbine). We’ll need even more electricity to manufacture this new carpet or, more likely, will import it from countries with cheaper, abundant electricity not produced by wind and solar.

When politicians say renewables are the cheapest form of electricity, they ignore most of the costs of new transmission lines, decommissioning and replacement. But someone has to pay them or there’s no return on capital invested. That someone will be electricity consumers and taxpayers.?

This wind and solar carpet will be made up of steel, concrete, plastics, resins, chemicals and other materials, many of which are hazardous (including when broken up on decommissioning). Decommissioning presents significant additional costs and logistical headaches, assuming the plant owner actually does it. Exactly where will these country-sized carpets of hazardous waste be disposed of? Recycling and reuse is costly and unviable. And it’s not good enough to assume future innovation will make it viable just because we want it to.?

Nuclear waste has three advantages.

Firstly, unlike other industrial waste, radioactivity reduces over time. After 40 years, the radioactivity of high level waste decreases to one-thousandth of the original levels and low and intermediate waste (about 97% of the waste) ceases to be hazardous at all.

Secondly, nuclear energy produces a tiny volume of waste which is all solid. All the spent fuel rods from U.S. commercial reactors since the 1950s could be stacked together less than 10 metres high on a single football field. And spent rods can be stored at the plant.

Thirdly there’s proven technology to reuse spent fuel rods as an energy source in itself.

It's therefore completely irrational that cost and waste are used to reject nuclear power out of hand.

But the real problem with Finkel’s vision is most Australians won’t tolerate it. They won’t tolerate ongoing skyrocketing costs and winters of blackouts while they wait for some theoretically cheaper (but only if you ignore a lot of the costs that have to be paid for) electricity in decades to come. And they won’t tolerate a country carpeted with wind farms and solar panels filled with hazardous materials. They’ll regard this as environmental desecration and destruction on a grand scale. Because it is.??

I especially don’t believe the Aboriginal traditional owners who have rights over, and are custodians of, much of the land and sea that will be carpeted over will tolerate it either. People promoting this future seem to look at Australia’s remote country the same way the colonists looked at it in the 1800s: a vast expanse of nothing that’s available for their own pet projects. It’s not.??

People have been living in a fantasy world for too long. Politicians and industry leaders haven’t been honest with people. And they’ve been ignoring, and too often demonising, the reliable low and no-emission energy sources of gas and nuclear which have a proven ability to provide abundant electricity within the existing grid, with known costs profiles and a track record of safety and cradle to grave management.?

Had Australia’s leadership already taken steps to move to gas and nuclear, we’d be well on the way to net zero, energy independence and abundant electricity and we wouldn’t have lost so many high energy consuming industries offshore. We can’t make up that lost time. But perhaps Finkel’s vision will jolt this country into some sense.

This article was first published in the Australian Financial Review on 20 June 2023. Nyunggai Warren Mundine AO DUniv (Hon. Causa) is Director, Indigenous Forum, Centre for Independent Studies . @nyunggai