What would it cost? And what is the carbon footprint of the physical effort to remove the footing of one of the many 200m tall wind turbine towers soon to be seen scattered across the Wheatbelt?
We don’t know because the wind farm proponents, the government, and all those who worship these icons to the gods of climate change, seem strangely disinterested in this question.
But it is a legitimate question every landholder who signs up to having one of these things towering over their property should be asking.
With between 700-1000m3 of concrete for the reinforced base, think of a shed 10m x 10m x 10m, that’s 70-100 truck loads of reinforced cement, it’s no simple thing to remove when no longer needed.
Decommissioning these towers and jackhammering out the foundations at the end of their economic lifespan, or until the taxpayers get annoyed enough with the cost and unreliability of these things and demand the politicians stop the subsidies, is one of those phenomenally expensive exercises that the wind industry conveniently don’t factor into their full costings.
Sure, some of the towers might be there for 100 years, but sooner or later they will fall into disuse, leaving the question of who picks up the tab for their removal blowing in the wind.
No doubt there is some fine print at the bottom of the lease contracts that talk about the company being responsible for the removal and site clean up, but what guarantee is there the company will have the funds, or there is a big enough bond available to do the work?
I know a thing or two about environmental bonds, having worked for the Minister for Mines during the fallout of the 2007 financial crisis.
I have seen mining company environmental bonds, linked to mine site rehabilitation obligations, suddenly become worthless when the banks went wobbly and walked away from underwriting them.
When this happened, not surprisingly, the government did not force the mine to close down as it was the last thing they needed during the middle of a financial crisis.
It was left to the government as the insurer of last resort to step in, but you know what the state does when they are faced with big future liabilities? They sign up then close their eyes and kick the problem down the road onto the next generation.
That’s why we have over 100,000 ex-mines sites, tailing dumps, pits, shafts, quarries, etc, across Western Australia that have been abandoned and left needing revegetation and cleaning up.
Why? Because the State government has ignored the problem after failing to put in place (up until 2012) a proper environmental bond system to ensure all mine sites were properly rehabilitated at the end of their life.
In response to the 2007 credit crunch, the government put in place a new state managed environmental fidelity fund similar to what the real estate agents have.
It was a good solution but needs decades to build the reserves to cover all the risks.
Today, the fund has around $250m in it and it grows at around $40m a year. It’s not enough to even to start to cover the potential liabilities but it is a start.
The government uses the interest to start the long process of sorting the state’s long legacy of abandoned mines. It is predicted that it will take 1000 years and many mining booms to fund the work that needs to be done.
The government seems not to have learnt from its mining experience and is currently leaving it to the wind farm proponents to guarantee decommissioning, again through a promise of some sort of financial assurance backed by the banks.
The experience with the miners tells me that any landholder who accepts any assurances that are not backed by the state government linked to a fidelity fund risks being left with some big useless concrete blocks and worse some very tall towers which might make for good radio antennas but not much else.
Wind wire city
Those heathens not so enamoured by our modern cathedrals of wind turbines and high voltage power lines and unlucky enough to live in a windy rural community should take note of the experience of the small community of Moyne Shire in Victoria.
Today it is blessed with over 300 turbines, allowing every farmer and town resident to enjoy the vista of the renewables industry blighting their landscape.
The locals are not surprisingly unimpressed with their new national hallowed status as the mecca of renewables.
It’s bad enough the big 200m towers but it’s the new spaghetti of poles and wires servicing them, reminiscent of the old phone lines that used to dot our roadsides that now cross the landscape that is the talk of the district.
All too late the Shire President has called for the introduction of rules making it mandatory for all new high voltage power lines to be placed underground or co-located with existing lines wherever possible.
A motion at the State local government association meeting gained the support of almost all of Victoria’s councils, calling on the state government to back proposed changes to prevent the “industrialisation of the landscape.”
Western Australian country people need to take heed, particularly those in shires high on the list of areas to be blessed with new wind farm developments.
Preferably, the government should be putting these things offshore where the wind is more reliable and the power lines run under the sea, ideally right off Cottesloe and Dunsborough beaches where the Teal voters can be reminded what powers their Teslas.
Failing that, the government should mandate that the wind farms be placed on pastoral leases far from the view of country folk, with the power lines being sunk underground when passing through farming areas.
It’s ironic to think that Western Power has embarked on a program to roll up thousands of kilometres of the old SEC rural network while others propose to roll out thousands of kilometres of high tension power lines across the same farm paddocks.
Farmers should not have to look at what warms the hearts and bodies of the inner-city progressives who believe that no cost is too high for others to bear when it comes to addressing climate change.
The State, Liberals, and Nationals should come out with a policy that anyone within kitchen window view of one of these turbines should get compensation for lack of visual amenity and all new heavy power lines should go underground.
The race is on
The Federal government’s national target of 82 per cent renewable powering the electricity market by 2030 will require 18,000 km of new transmission lines and the installation of 40 mega wind turbines every month until 2030 not to mention 22,000 solar panels every day.
Add to that Andrew Forrest’s own personal target of 15 million tonnes of green hydrogen by 2030 and we have to take seriously the potential impact of the proliferation of wind turbines, poles and wires across the State over the next seven years.
Putting aside the fact that neither the federal government nor Forrest Future Industries IFFI) has a hope in hell of achieving their targets, it would not be advisable to stand in front of the coming tsunami of renewable activity that’s coming our way.
The Federal government has put $2 billion on the table as part of its renewable’s incentive fund which no doubt FFI will be tapping into to help fund its array of projects.
In turn, FFI has access to FMGs annual $5 billion profit plus a chairman who has totally brought into the potential of hydrogen as the key to saving the planet and achieving his green mining commitments.
FFI is planning to build a northern renewable energy hub on its stations in the Pilbara plus a southern export green hydrogen project based on either a Nullarbor station (Rawlinna) or on leased sites around Esperance.
The northern hub would consist of 340 wind turbines alongside solar panels across a development envelope of more than 65,000 hectares of land and a disturbance footprint of more than 10,000 hectares that would power FMGs operations.
The southern project has yet to be detailed but all indications are it would be as large as the northern hub, if the economics, not to mention the engineering, ever stack up, and aimed at exporting green hydrogen from Esperance port.
If it’s anywhere near the size of the northern project there are going to be some massive poles, wires and turbines dotting the landscape around the Esperance farming community and potentially other parts of the Wheatbelt.
In a recent article in The Australian ‘Andrew Forrest’s green hydrogen dream doesn’t hold water’ (4/9/23) the scale of the projects of what FFI are planning is laid out:”It must install 20 wind turbine blades daily, each 80m long, and install 31 million solar modules a year.” It sounds like the Federal government all over again!
If even a fraction of this investment takes place in Western Australia then there will be a lot of poles, wires, turbines and towers coming to a farm or a whale near you. Let’s just hope the excitement of renewables does not leave us with long term environmental problems.
Thrown to the Wind
I wonder how many of the Greenpeace activist types have watched the doco Thrown to the Wind about the whale deaths off the East Coast of the United States?
The full film (see the trailer here), documents surprisingly loud, high-decibel sonar emitted by the survey vessels used to look for sites to plant offshore wind turbines and how the increased boat traffic during the building process is directly correlated with whale deaths.
The doco exposes the reality that the responsible government agencies, and the scientists who work for them, either haven’t done the basic mapping and acoustic research to back up their claims that there is no impact, have done the research badly, or have found what the film found, and are covering it up.
All indications are that too many of the world’s scientists have forgotten what it means to be a scientist and have put activism in front of details like scientific proof. Our scientists have a bad habit of turning a blind eye to the impact of wind farms on rare birds, theirs seem to be blind when it comes to the impact on whales.
But then, what’s a few rare birds or whales when it comes to saving the planet?
Some of you might not be aware that whale oil powered the industrial revolution and provided a renewable natural source of light for the Western world from around 1800 – 1840. Well it was renewable, it’s just they got a bit carried away.
Luckily for the whales we discovered fossil fuels so kerosene and then gas replaced blubber candles and petroleum oils replaced whale oil as a machine lubricant. But before then whaling was big business.
At one stage, Western Australia was visited by over 300 whaling boats a year (mostly American). In fact our very first export business was whale products.
What this has to do with agriculture and Western Australia?
Well, Western Australia is home to one of the great whale migrations, with up to 45,000 mostly humpbacks making the pilgrimage each year up and back from the Antarctic to the warm waters of the Kimberley to breed.
Once WA was settled (that’s the 1829 settlement not the Mungo Man 32,000 year ago version) the government kicked out the foreign whalers, and we set up our own onshore whaling factories at Fremantle, Dunsborough, Point Cloates (Ningaloo), Carnarvon, and Albany.
They turned out not to be very profitable and not very popular with the environmentalists with Albany closing in 1978. Since then, the number of whales has been growing each year, but that may soon change when the four planned big offshore wind farms start their seismic investigations.
Recall the outcry a decade ago against the drum line shark experiment? Six thousand people from the Western suburbs could be seen weeping and holding candles (non whale oil but carbon emitting) on Cottesloe Beach while they ate their grilled fish (shark minus the grease). Imagine how much they love whales (side point the growth in shark attacks is directly linked to the growth in whale numbers).
So, what do you suppose will happen when we get a few whales beached near the old Freo, Albany or Dunsborough whaling stations as a direct result of the development of these wind farms?
Yes, you got it, another all night vigil, with the help of some chardonnay and grilled shark. No doubt the government will panic and send the developers packing from the ocean and off inland to where the political outcry from the Teals and Western suburbs can’t be heard.
