The state’s peak agricultural body says the NSW Government will need to work hard to undo short-sighted energy planning that puts farming families at risk.
Reg Kidd, chair of the NSW Farmers Energy Transition Working Group, said the cost of securing the state’s electricity supply was being borne by farming families.
“There has been an abject failure to properly plan for a transition away from coal-fired electricity, and the pressure is now on the new state government to make things right,” Mr Kidd said.
“We’re now racing to build forests of turbines and solar paddocks to keep the lights on, and the resultant regional uproar comes from the failure to understand the issues and plan to avoid them, not just dealing with them when they occur.
“The government faces a challenge in moving transmission from existing locations to new sources of power located predominantly in farming regions; to date we’ve seen a trashing of rural amenity across the state on a scale never seen or anticipated, and simply not communicated to the people who live there.”
Mr Kidd commended Premier Chris Minns for comments made in the media reaffirming his commitment to keeping the Eraring power station open beyond 2025 to avoid sudden blackouts, but said it should never have come to this.
“Mr Minns will find himself in a tough position where he’s got bureaucrats drawing lines on maps on one side, and farming communities facing the bulldozing of homes on the other,” he said.
“If EnergyCo and other parties had simply come to people in the first place and said ‘this is what we want to do, how can we do it?’ we’d have saved a lot of hassle.
“At the end of the day you need the right thing in the right place, but it has to be done in the right way or it will never work.”
Mr Kidd particularly criticised the lack of meaningful engagement with the people who would be most impacted by these projects.
“Energy Co are tasked with meaningful engagement with communities, but the rising groundswell of opposition to transmission lines and the cumulative impact in some areas of renewable energy generation is a demonstration this is not working,” he said.
“Undergrounding as an option in the bush was previously summarily dismissed without any consideration of the impacts of overhead wires – such as increased fire threats to communities with fresh memories of Black Summer – but it’s back on the table with this new parliamentary inquiry, as it should be.
“While it may be convenient to say this needs to get done with haste, in regional NSW the cheap and reliable power for urban areas is coming at a real cost. Communities see a lack of planning, threats – not benefits – to rural jobs, road chaos, shortages of accommodation and a legacy of iron and wires across pristine landscapes.”
