VALUES TO VALUE: Tough gigs, energy transitions.
One decade, let’s call it the 1990s, you’re a niche emerging industry with a fantastical notion that most of the world’s energy needs can be generated from free resources, the sun and the wind.
Incumbent oil, gas and coal – the fossil fuels trio, which come with mega “property rights” and “vested interests” attached – are openly laughing at you. Nuclear is laughing too. In what world could this be true?
Move forward a couple of decades and global capital wants to invest in solar, wind and batteries to spread their intermittent energy impact 24/7/365, and little else.
But now everyone’s roles are being flipped.
The green activists who used to protest outside coal fired power stations and polluting factories are now trying to champion the build-out of renewables.
Not just 50 per cent renewables or 100 per cent. It’s now 500 per cent or 1000 per cent or more. Renewables in hyperdrive. Not just replacing coal and gas for stationary generation of electricity, and oil-derived fuels for transport, but also huge electricity surpluses and green hydrogen to underpin a huge new industrial energy export industry.
There’s a catch, of course. Massive amounts of renewables require massive amounts of land and sea.
Not so much as other major industries already disrupting the natural environment in some way, such as agriculture, livestock and fishing.
But definitely a much larger physical “footprint” than traditional, highly centralised coal, gas and even nuclear generation plants.
So, the defenders of the old energy order, who used to be the establishment figures fending off the green activists, are now cast as activists themselves, albeit reactionary ones.
They are the ones put in the bush fighting solar and wind farms, and the big transmission lines needed to connect them to the energy consumers in the cities. And they’re fighting on the beaches too, now that offshore wind is becoming a thing in Australia.
Nor is this story just playing out in Australia.
It’s in North America and Europe, and it will be in Asia and Africa, if it’s not already.
On social media, I see threads like this one, a tale of a solar farm and Joshua trees in California, on an almost daily basis.
Last week, Jennifer Morris, the CEO of US based The Nature Conservancy, released a policy paper, Mining the Sun, arguing for locating solar and wind energy projects on former mine lands and “brownfields”, rather than alienating farmlands or more environmentally sensitive sites.
Ketan Joshi, reporting from Norway, paints a sad picture of out-of-control corporate clean energy development stirring massive community backlash.
None of this is especially new. As this fact-checking story from the ABC in 2022 shows, sparked by misinformation that Scotland had cleared 14 million trees to make way for wind, when it turned out they were commercial plantation pines and 272 million new trees had been planted over the same period of about 20 years.
Don’t get me wrong. There are places where solar and onshore wind farms, and also offshore wind farms, shouldn’t go for a range of environmental, social, aesthetic and community reasons. (Just as there are places nuclear power stations shouldn’t go, overwhelmingly for economic and timing reasons, but environmental ones too, which include all of Australia.)
This year federal environment minister Tanya Plibersek has been criticised for knocking back a solar farm proposal in Queensland, where she cited water resource and biodiversity reasons, while also being slammed for delays in approvals for renewables projects.
A month earlier Plibersek had knocked back a controversial wind farm proposal in Far North Queensland adjacent to the Wet Tropics World Heritage Area.
Not only do such knockbacks happen, they need to be seen to be happening, and there will be more.
Every anti-climate action, anti-renewables, anti-woke and pro-nuclear campaigner in the country is jumping on the “environment-destroying solar and wind” bandwagon.
It’s worth remembering, however, that just a few decades ago it was today’s renewables champions who were the fringe green activists who were defeated on nearly every big development they ever opposed.
Just occasionally they would have a win and celebrate like crazy. Then go back to the drudge of losing most times.
It’s really no different for today’s motley crew of right-wingers, climate deniers, coal-keepers and nuke-lovers. They’ll get some wins, there’ll be some backsliding, yet the tide of energy history is clear, global capital has shifted already, and renewables are winning.
Ultimately, renewables champions need to keep taking their chill pills and stay the course.
Governments are getting smarter, and renewables developers are learning valuable lessons about building partnerships with communities, including indigenous ones which need the right blend of economic gain with environmental and heritage protection.
Societies adapt to new realities.
Transitions are touch gigs. But they get easier as the change passes through some key tipping points and the new becomes the norm.
