Battling offshore wind for NSW coast 

Reckless Renewable Rally, held near Macquarie St, Martin Place in Sydney. Picture: Britta Campion / The Australian

Down in Austinmer, that pretty northern Illawarra village south of Sydney, with its crescent beach and tidal pools, Dr Saul Griffith can hear each day half a dozen coal trains thundering down the railway line near his home as he despairs about the ­nation’s energy future.

About 50km south down the M1 and off Grand Pacific Drive, Jay McIlquham, president of the Shellharbour Game Fishing Club, is fuming that his rights to fish offshore could soon be threatened in the name of renewable energy, disrupting the tuna runs and wiping out the local lobster fisheries.

Up near Port Stephens, that splendid harbour 300km north of Wollongong and a 50-minute drive from Newcastle, roadside billboards have appeared depicting beached whale carcasses sacrificed on the altar of clean, green energy, their murderers scything in the breeze just offshore.

Nearby, at Norah Head, surfers young and old have become agitated at a possible threat to the quality of their waves and the safety of marine life if these monsters are allowed to proliferate in their pristine waters.

And in his office at the South Coast Union Alliance back in Wollongong, union secretary Arthur Rorris is negotiating a Vietnamese soup lunch, flabbergasted by the most vicious and supremely organised cyber brawling over a singular issue he has seen in decades of politics, so sustained and littered with misinformation that he has dubbed it a “virtual Dark Age”.

From Port Stephens to Kiama, allegations and threats and theories have been flying. It is an international capitalist conspiracy. Koalas will be killed. So too flocks of migratory birds. Property prices will plummet. Tourism will dry up. It’s a corporate money grab. Paragliders off Stanwell Park will be falling out of the sky.

The anger is so palpable that a petition is circulating to prematurely remove Anthony Albanese from office.

It’s an anger that has taken over the entire east coast and engulfed Labor’s plans to embrace renewables as the future of the economy.

Even now it is a Labor minister, Tanya Plibersek, who has blown up the Victorian government’s plans to build a hub in the Port of Hastings and turn the state into a renewables behemoth.

And the reason for all this, one of the most rancorous public debates in recent memory? For the pitting of community sentiment against science? For government against the people?

What was the match that hit the tinder and caused a conflagration bigger than both sides of this issue probably didn’t anticipate? What has fanned that fire?

Offshore wind turbine electricity farms.

According to the Australian State of the Environment Report in 2021, 87 per cent of the Australian population – or 22 million people – lived within 50km of the nation’s coastline.

While this figure has increased in the past 20 years, helped along in more recent times by the Covid-19 pandemic, the attachment Australians have with the coast and its thousands of beaches around the country has, over time, become almost mythical. A part of our national DNA.

BBC travel journalist Donna Wheeler wrote in 2010: “The beach for most Australians is not just a place to cool off on a hot day, it is a place for the tentative dips of the toes in the shallows of early childhood and a place where teenage rites of passage played out. It is where many old Australians retire and where their ashes are scattered at life’s end. It is where they celebrate, socialise, exercise or relax with a book on the sand. It is also where they go to gather their thoughts in times of crisis.”

And writer Ann Game said: “Nature levels us, the sea is an equaliser. No one owns the sun, sea, surf – or everyone, all Australians, own it.”

This deep generational attachment may explain in part the relatively swift community distaste for the federal government’s proposal to build two massive wind farms – one off Port Stephens and another further south off the coast of the ­Illawarra region. Both areas were chosen because of their industrial attributes, deep water ports and existing and expedient access to power grids. Not to mention consistent offshore winds.

The high-volume protests against the projects, theoretically expected to be in operation beyond 2030, had taken many by surprise given the offshore renewable energy process was still in its embryonic stages.

When Climate and Energy Minister Chris Bowen first announced six proposed regions for “world-class offshore wind energy potential” back in 2022 (including the Hunter and the Illawarra), he trumpeted that the projects would generate thousands of jobs and steer the nation towards its net-zero emissions target in 2050.

(The proposed wind farm off Victoria’s Gippsland coastline was the first to be government-­declared last year.)

Whale migration

In mooting the Hunter proposal in February last year, Bowen said the 1854km sq zone had the capacity to generate eight gigawatts of electricity, or “enough to power six million homes”. In favour of the Hunter plan was the region’s “strong, consistent winds” and that it was “close to areas of high electricity demand and existing connections to the grid”. The area was formally declared on July 12, with the zone stretching from Port Stephens in the north to Norah Head in the south.

In theory, the proposed zone would have more than 100 floating turbines at a height of 260m.

By August last year, Bowen had announced a 1461km sq zone off the Illawarra coastline as NSW’s second offshore wind farm, stretching from Wombarra in the north to Kiama in the south. It would generate 4.2GW, or enough to power 3.4 million homes. The Illawarra model would also house in excess of 100 turbines, also at a height of around 260m.

Both farms will be located 10km to 30km out to sea.

Within weeks of Bowen’s Hunter announcement, the anti-wind farm warriors began gathering. Facebook groups and discussion boards flourished. Many of these social media groups quickly attracted thousands of followers.

And one of the first battlegrounds in the debate was the fate of migratory whales.

Grant Drinkwater of the Coalition Against Offshore Wind in the Illawarra was quick to stress that the proposed wind farm with in excess of 100 turbines was in the middle of the traditional annual whale migration path.

“First and foremost in my mind and I suppose in the members of the Coalition … is the effect on the environment,” Mr Drinkwater said. “So, you know, we see it as ­especially during the construction phase, the effect on the marine environment, particularly whales, will be immense.

“Basically, they coalesce around Eden and then head north to within zero to 30km off the coast. And they do not digress out of that. There are about 40,000 whales a year. So you’ve got those whales heading north and south from about June through to the end of October.

“An expert on the subject of whales said they (the wind farm construction companies) will possibly have to cease work during the whale migration period because of the risk of striking the whales because … when they’re building these things, they’re going to be crisscrossing directly across the path of the whales.

“It’s the increase in marine traffic which we see is the biggest risk first and foremost. And of course, once the things are built … I don’t think that they’re intrinsically going to kill whales just because there’s a structure there … but there’s this talk of electromagnetic radiation that’s given off … that’s a different issue.”

Mr Drinkwater said other concerns included the danger to local fisheries, particularly the lobster industry. And that tourism would take a hit because studies had shown that “60 per cent of people who visited coastal areas with offshore wind farms would not return to that area”.

“And then … you’ve got that whole effect of all the people that live here and love the Illawarra for the beauty and, you know, the sort of seaside environment and all that,” he said. “You know, we’re going to be stuck looking out at these things.”

Blanket opposition

Good for the Gong group co-founder Sean Moran had a different take. He was disheartened at the spread on social media of false data and information.

“I was disappointed and angry that one of our first big opportunities in decades to transition to renewable energy was coming up against a group of people who seem to have no issue using misinformation to push their position,” Mr Moran said.

“There’s a lot of people in the community that don’t say this is a bad thing. In fact, they see it as a potentially positive thing. Then there’s a lot of people sort of claiming very outrageous things basically being pulled out of thin air. Things like changes to the weather patterns and impacts on whales and things like that. And none of us want to see impacts to the whales and nature, but we want to see that investigated appropriately and then mitigated at the appropriate phase of the develop­ment and not sort of whipped up as a sort of blanket opposition.”

He believed renewable energy could be beneficial for the region.

“It could create opportunities for people to transition from high carbon jobs,” he said. “We’re an area that has a long history of coalmining and steel-making, very carbon-intensive industries. Moving to renewables is an opportunity to both acknowledge our industrial past and create jobs for the future.”

He said he accepted some of the objections from people on the other side of the debate: “I understand that there are concerns, you know, the fishermen for example, and some people don’t want to see these things on the horizon, but I think all this needs to be properly investigated and then mitigated in some way or another at the appropriate time. It would be a shame for this to get shut down at this at this very, very early stage.”

Marine concerns

Up at Port Stephens, whale watch boat operator Frank Future was just bringing some tourists back to the dock when he reflected on the possible impact of the wind farms not just on the environment, but on his business and the many others that rely on the tourist dollar on the Central Coast of NSW.

“I’m a long-term tour operator, a cruise operator, and we began whale watching here 28 years ago and watched it grow as an industry,” he said. “And it’s become a critical industry in the winter and spring in Port Stephens, which was a very quiet little port before whale watching began.

“I’m particularly concerned. And so are some of my marine colleagues in the fishing industry. Both recreational and commercial fishing are big industries here as well. So combined they attract over $1bn a year in income.

“So anything that is likely to ­affect them because there aren’t many examples of these giant floating wind farms around to be able to, you know, gain too much science literature on them. But from what I have read and looked up and whatnot, there are some real concerns over especially noise in the water which may not be quite as bad as some of the sonar or things like that, but it’s thousands and thousands of meters of very heavy chains that will be anchoring things, and the electromagnetic radiation that seems to come off some of the big cabling is also very disturbing because it’s having an effect on lobsters and other creatures that crawl around the bottom. It could literally sterilise them.

“But the effect on whales has been a primary concern. As for the aesthetics, we will see them from the shore.”

Thousands of people have taken to numerous Facebook groups and other social media platforms to vent their anger at not just the proposals but at the federal government and, in particular, Chris Bowen.

On the No Coastal Wind Farms Port Stephens website, members let rip.

“Only way to stop them is to vote them out,” wrote one.

“It’s time to get down and dirty with Chris Bowen,” added another. And: “If these monsters were to go ahead, they would have a minuscule or no effect on world climate.” And: “Destroy the coast and kill the trees.”

On No Offshore Wind Farms Illawarra, the debate has even inspired song lyrics with a nod to Annie Lennox’s song, “Why”: “To build so high with a chopper in everyone’s eye / As far as one can see the debt to society / Never ending condescending / Sheer disbelief / way beyond our means to keep / Turning inside out / turning inside out / tell me why?” And: “The blades from environmentally friendly subsidised bird-and-bat-chomping inefficient wind turbines have a short life and cannot be recycled.”

And: “He is full of gas, Bowen.”

Waging a proxy war

South Coast Labour Council secretary Arthur Rorris said he had never seen anything like the current wind farm stoush, which he believes has been a political “hit” by outsiders.

“Without using the military analogy too much, but it’s sort of like a dirty bomb. It just puts shit over everyone,” he said. “And they accuse everyone of being either corrupt, or disingenuous, or not independent. They have literally tried to take out anyone who was in favour of the wind farms. They cast aspersions on the characters of our independent academics, on journalists, on everyone they could find who they couldn’t control to say it was bad.”

He blamed, in part, Liberal Party operatives.

“They came up with this myth about whales, without any evidence, and they did it so quickly that it really didn’t give the organic circles, let’s just say, a chance to respond,” Mr Rorris said. “And we feel like we’ve been used as a social laboratory because I don’t think the Liberals think they can take Wollongong. I think it’s because they know they can’t take Wollongong. They were prepared to mess up the joint with every technique they could. So we’re under no illusions that what they’re doing here is they’re waging a proxy war.

“It’s actually not about the community fighting the community. It’s actually about the Libs getting everyone to fight everyone and trying out their techniques.”

Rorris wrote to Bowen warning him that the consultation process with regard to the wind farm ­projects may already have been corrupted.

“We fully support the democratic right in all members of our community to hold different views and indeed to campaign around these issues,” Rorris reportedly said. “What we find abhorrent, however, is the use of deliberate information to not only divide communities but turn a consultation process about clean energy into a Trump-style circus driven by internet trolls and fuelled by fear that has been manufactured and imported.”

Rorris told The Australian that the sustained and supremely organised attack on every aspect of the wind farm debate with these “Trump-bombs” had been disorienting for the entire community.

“It’s like getting thrown or being dumped by this huge wave where you don’t know up from down, you know, the sand from the sky. This is what they did,” he said of the proposal’s detractors. “And they did it so quickly and so hard that it was very effective. I did not think this was possible. And I’ve been in the game a long time. I’ve been secretary for 23 years. I have never, ever seen anything like it. And we’ve seen lots of attempts for people to do snow jobs and to sell snow jobs, but never something that was so vicious.”

Dr Saul Griffith, inventor, author and scientist, has had decades of experience in the offshore wind industry and has worked with the US Department of Energy to find ways to reduce the cost of offshore wind projects.

He wrote in a recent essay: “The Illawarra wind project is meaningful. It is a 4.2GW nameplate capacity project that should typically produce 15,000 GWh of electricity, or an incredible 15 billion kWh of electricity, every year. It is more than enough energy to power a few million … homes. To power every household in the Illawarra, including electric vehicles as a substitute for our high-emitting fossil fuel vehicles, would only need around 2 billion kWh per year.

“This project, in combination with community and rooftop solar and batteries, can easily guarantee a 100 per cent reliable and clean energy system for every home in the Illawarra. In fact, there would be a huge amount of excess energy to power the industries of the future. We can and we should build the infrastructure of the 21st century in this community so that our children can live in this beautiful place while having an outsized impact on global climate solutions.”