This AFR article gives you a sense of cost and time disruption of renewables in getting connected to the grid to make up for the removal of reliable coal and gas generated electricity. Net zero electrification timetables are coming up against reality on the ground.
Landowners want to bury transmission project (literally)
Landowners in the path of the hotly contested Humelink transmission project have enthusiastically welcomed NSW Energy Minister Penny Sharpe’s decision to hold an inquiry into the costs and benefits of putting the vital link underground.
Michael Katz, who owns a Wagyu beef stud at Gurrundah, west of Goulburn, said the inquiry was critical and should allow a “thorough and careful analysis of the true cost of undergrounding high voltage transmission through high value, high risk land”.
Humelink is one of several new transmission links which are urgently required to connect new wind solar farms being built in far-flung regions to major population centres historically served by coal plants in the NSW Hunter Valley and Victoria’s Latrobe Valley. Many wind and solar farms are having their output curtailed to ease grid congestion, deterring developers and financiers from green lighting new projects and undermining the energy transition.
But the new transmission projects traverse high value farmland in southern NSW and northern and western Victoria, where landowners are mounting a pitched battle against them and arguing they should be put underground – which increases the cost by three times or more and is rarely done over large distances.
Ms Sharpe on Tuesday asked a Legislative Council committee to inquire into “the feasibility of undergrounding transmission infrastructure for renewable energy projects”. She said she had listened to concerns about “environmental, agricultural, community and other effects of the HumeLink project and ... other transmission projects”.
Landowners argue some long-distance transmission links are now being put underground in Europe, North America and even Victoria, and the inquiry’s terms of reference also include “case studies” on such projects and impacts on delivery timeframes and the environment.
Mr Katz said landowners will argue “long and hard that the modest increase in the true upfront cost of construction is more than overshadowed by the almost certain costs” of bushfires caused by the lines or which start elsewhere and escape control because they can’t be fought aerially near high towers, loss of critical vegetation and visual amenity, and the higher maintenance costs and outages from overhead lines.
Andrea Strong, who runs about 600 beef cattle on a 650 hectare property near Gunning, between Yass and Goulburn, lobbied the NSW government as part of the HumeLink Alliance and said she welcomed the inquiry.
She said the size of the towers for the 500 kilovolt lines – 70 metres to 80 metres high, compared to 45 metres for existing 175kV and 330kV lines – relative to trees and landscape intensified the impact.
She noted that the Marinus Link and proposed link to the Star of the South offshore wind project both include significant underground stages, as do new long distance transmission lines in Germany and from Canada-New York.
Transgrid CEO Brett Redman said on Tuesday that an approximate doubling of the compensation paid to landowners for hosting transmission to about $400,000 per kilometre last September – when a “strategic benefits payment” was added to an existing statutory payment in NSW – “should help”. But he conceded it would not placate all landowners and that more transparency and consultation would be needed.
He said only 40 per cent of affected landowners had so far agreed to host Humelink towers on their land.
Marie Jordan, Transgrid’s head of networks, said the process was going well considering the stage it was at and Transgrid would work with each landowner on everything from biosecurity risk and – such as washing vehicles as they travel between different properties – to making “microadjustments” to the route “to make sure we do the best we can”.
But Rebecca Tobin, whose family runs about 800 cattle on their Hereford stud at Darlow, between Gundagai and Batlow, said the property was caught up in the January 2020 Dunns Road fire and asked “what’s the cost of a life?“.
“We are petrified of the next fire and we know there is no way we can fight fires safely around overhead transmission towers and when we spoke to Transgrid they have got not way of mitigating the risk,” she said.
Mr Katz also accused Transgrid of “double counting” on compensation. “We were never really campaigning about compensation although clearly the concept of ‘just compensation’ needs to be much more thoroughly developed than current practice,” he said via email.
(20min delay)