Just west of Rockhampton are rolling hills of subtropical bushland. Pioneers named the area “Kalapa”, the Aboriginal word for the local wasps and hornets.
The area is now dominated by cattle and a coal-fired power station. The cattle industry did not clear the hills, so they remain in a pristine state full of koalas and sugar gliders, and probably the wasps and hornets too.
Kalapa is about to be transformed into a huge industrial park through the planned installation of more than 50 wind turbines. These will stand on the top of the mountains at a height of 275 metres to their blade tip, three times the height of the flag on top of Parliament House.
The turbines require a 200×200 metre level pad. Kalapa’s beautiful rolling hills will lose about 20 metres off their tops, creating huge amounts of sediment that will be pushed into the Great Barrier Reef catchment area. A grazier would go to jail for trying something like that these days.
Conservationists say that after this destruction, the pockmarked bushland will decimate the migratory patterns of the koala and sugar glider populations.
Despite some loud claims to the contrary, farmers are opposed to renewable developments because they care about the bushland they live in. The independent Energy Infrastructure Commissioner found that 90 per cent of farmers were dissatisfied with the way renewable energy was being rolled out. They don’t want to see forests destroyed, especially for the pursuit of an inefficient, intermittent and unreliable energy source.
There are probably now more supporters of the NSW State of Origin team around Kalapa than there are of renewable energy.
I once had a cup of tea on the deck of a concerned farmer in the area. We could see the Stanwell coal-fired power station clearly. It was only about 8 kilometres away. I asked him, “what do you think of that?”
He said he had never had an issue with the station. Indeed, during lean times on the farm, he worked there.
The Kalapa wind factory won’t provide many jobs for the locals. After construction, there will be just a handful of people employed and not in highly paid, skilled positions.
Much worse, at 10,900 hectares, the wind factory will have six times the environmental footprint of the coal-fired power station, and produce just a tenth of the power. Why would so-called environmentalists support such an inefficient form of power generation requiring so much land to be destroyed compared with the alternatives?
As someone remarked to me, we are not going to save the polar bear by killing the koala bear.
If this was just one isolated example, perhaps it wouldn’t deserve national attention. But hundreds of communities are equally concerned about the destruction of their local environment by wind and solar factories.
A report by Net Zero Australia, a group that supports the net zero goal, says that an area half the size of Victoria must be converted to wind and solar infrastructure. This is environmental destruction on an industrial scale.
After all this environmental devastation, renewable energy is not even delivering the cheaper power it promised. The pending and tragic demise of Australia’s nickel industry is a clear real-world test of the claims of the renewable energy industry.
The Australian nickel industry pursued a green, ESG strategy, believing that because nickel went into Teslas, the world’s customers would demand a renewable energy-powered mining process.
Meanwhile, Indonesia built coal-fired power stations like they were going out of fashion. In 2022, Indonesia increased its coal use by an astounding 32 per cent.
In what should be a national embarrassment, Indonesia is now stealing our once proud nickel industry because it can produce nickel cheaper, even though that country has relatively poorer laterite nickel geologies. More than 10,000 Australians face job losses and already 1000 have been sacked.
Some of those workers were at a nickel mine shut by Andrew Forrest. He claims Indonesia is beating us only because of their poorer labour and environmental standards. But Australia has always had higher labour and regulation costs. That didn’t stop us from competing with Indonesia or others until we became obsessed with renewable energy.
Critical minerals processing is very energy-intensive and Indonesia’s coal-fired power is clearly cheaper than the renewable energy we are pursuing.
In the past, Australia could sustain high wages and world-leading environmental and labour standards because we had cheaper energy.
Life is about choices and if we choose the more unreliable and costly renewable energy option we will destroy our environment, become poorer and lose many of the industries that have made us a wealthy nation.
