Jim Wilmott:
No worries. Thank you for taking time out of your busy lives and coming here tonight. I've been very busy in the last couple of months getting out to communities in rural and regional Queensland and talking about renewables, but talking about I guess what's happening in rural and regional Queensland for the people involved in our primary industries, both agriculture and mining.
Over the last 18 months, I've talked to about 60 individual community groups. I've done about 60 presentations at town halls and the common messages that we're looking at is: people are really worried about their farmlands and the productive lands that they have and they want to protect them. They're worried about beautiful their scenic landscapes and they're worried about the strong communities and what's happening there to their communities with the rollout. And they're worried about the precious wildlife habitats that we've got left. And really that all comes together as they're worried about their way of life as Australians. And those four pillars that you see here are under threat from not only bad government energy policy, but bad policy in the way government is reacting to get to the holy grail of Net Zero.
So un-renewables, that's what we say to people. These things are actually unrenewable. Those pillars that make up the rural and regional Queensland stand for. If you look it up in the dictionary, it says that which cannot be replaced. Our way of life is unrenewable. I've talked about this before and really it's about how all this came to be in regards to the United Nations framework and Convention of Climate Change. The Kyoto protocol and the Paris Climate Change Agreement all came together to, what we're seeing now is: Albanese comes out and says that the 40% emission reductions by 2030 and a hundred percent emission reductions by 2050. And then we've got renewable generation coming into the mix too, where they want to get a hundred percent renewables into our national energy market, 82% by 2030. And that all comes together in a plan that comes out every two years since 2018. This one came out in July, the integrated system plan, which is about achieving a hundred percent renewables in our national energy market.
It's really based on two scenarios and these are the two scenarios that I'm going to show you the most likely scenarios to get there. It's called the step change. And it's a step change because we've got to have a massive renewable development in the lead up to 2050 to get a hundred percent renewables in the grid. So it's all about renewable expansion in what's left at two and a half decades. We've got less to 2050. Think of it, a tripling of renewable energy development this decade and then a doubling after that and a doubling after that. So the triple, double, double, that's how much we're looking at. And there's also the green energy hydrogen scenario. They call it the hydrogen superpower scenario.
You've got to talk, heard of Debreni, you would've, and my mate, Chris Bowen, he's not really my mate, talk about the production of hydrogen, how we're going to use it to power our industry, how we're going to export it from major ports to other countries. And that's got a massive renewable expansion because it takes a lot of electricity to break down water into oxygen and hydrogen. It takes a tremendous amount of electricity. And so there's going to be looking at a 34 times renewable expansion from now to 2050.
So what's that look like? And this is straight out of the government plans. This isn't my plan. These are the three decades, this decade, next decade and leading up to 2050. And so where green is wind development, yellow is actually solar development and you can see the step up that's going to increase the triple, double, double by the year 2050.
And then you overlay what they call it the hydrogen superpower thing, the same thing as the green export scenario.
What the development and dispersion of renewable energy development is going to take place across the eastern seaboard of Australia. So the national energy, when I say the NEM, it's the National Energy Market, which is just the physical grid covering the states of South Australia, Tasmania, Victoria, New South Wales and Queensland. So if you can imagine what that's going to do to rural and regional Queensland, and that's what I want to put through to you tonight and try and bring you on that journey with me.
That's why you've got 130 different action groups that have formed up. You've got tens of thousands of people saying, well, we don't want our countryside turned into this industrial pin cushion. So the rate and scale of change where we're putting through renewable energy faster than many other countries and faster than any other time in our history. It's a new gold rush because guess what? We're opening, we're rolling out the red carpet. They're coming. All these developers from around the world that have built out Europe are coming to Australia because we've got a very easy, I guess pathway that doesn't involve a lot of regulation and legislation for them to abide to.
Plus we actually pay them $15.2 billion a year. I won't go through all the different types of subsidies, but they've been introduced by both major political parties over the last 24 years, not just Labour. Liberal and the coalition have formulated this infrastructure to make it happen as well, unfortunately.
So what's it going to look like? We're going to have large scale wind complexes with a capacity factor of 30% so, you know, the wind doesn't always blow. So when they, you would see these large scale wind factories, and I'll call 'em factories they're not farms, they nameplate capacity. They might say it powers a hundred thousand homes.
Well it only powers a hundred thousand homes 30% of the time and that is why they need to have such an overbuild with wind complexes. Same with large solar factories. They have a maximum capacity factor of 25% because the sun doesn't shine all the day does it? And especially at night. So you've got to have a build out of a quad triple build out to get anywhere near the kind of capacity factor that they need and promote. And you're going to also have distributed solar on your rooftops and batteries and your EVs.
I've got solar on my roof, many people might have it here. I've got solar pumps, solar fences, I don't have a problem with that, but you can't run a modern society on renewables and rooftops solar, unfortunately.
This is the Emerald wind farm west of Cairns. It's been around about 12 years. Those towers are 140 metres at the hub with 56 metre blade. You see a bus down the bottom here. That is supposed to power 70,000 houses. It only powers way less than its capacity factor is 25%. 63 days of the year it produces zero power.
(audience member interruption)
This is just what you're going to see in the future with large solar factories. I'll just play this.
So that's what it's going to look. That's just out west of Gympie. It's about 500 acres. It was all blue gum flats and when it pans around, you'll see all this country out in the distance there will be covered by solar panels as well and battery energy storage systems. And there's another big solar factory out here.
Now, BP Lighthouse built this originally and it was sold to BJE Energy, which is a Chinese company. So they actually own that land and they probably even made the panels, I'm not sure.
And so this is all going to need firming capacity because variable renewable energy, it doesn't work all the time. So you've got to have firming capacity to even it out. So you're going to have pumped hydro with long-term eight to 24 hours. You're going to have utility scale battery energy storage systems for two to four hours. You're going to have gas fired peakers that are going to run on gas and then potentially green hydrogen if it ever gets to the ground.
So you've got all this background infrastructure that goes with renewable development. It's not just solar and wind. And when you see Bowen and Albanese saying it's the cheapest energy, it's got all this background infrastructure where you don't need that background infrastructure to prop it up when you're going coal or potentially nuclear, you don't need any of that. And you don't need;
So these are these battery energy storage systems. They're 20 or 40 foot containers, fully lithium. They do burn. Guess where they're made? They're all made in China as well. And a lot of these things are highly hackable. They're highly hackable. Vault Typhoon is a Chinese state sponsored hacker group that has invaded many of these major infrastructure items. Communication, transport, water, power in America; it can happen here in Australia as well.
We're going to have a massive transmission line development to add on to our national electricity grid. Anything from 10 to 28,000. Just recently, this is how much transmission line costing is going up. A line that's in the integrated system plan from Mudgee to Dubbo was quoted last year at $3.2 billion to do and now this year it's quoted at $5.2 billion, 70% increase. So you imagine what it's going to cost, even if we only have to build 10,000 high voltage transmission lines.
That's what they're going to look. That's a 500 KV transmission tower. They're not the smaller 275 KV lines. These things are up to 80 to 90 metres tall. They're massive and they cost a lot of money.
We're going to have heaps more renewable energy zones. We've got 47 across the eastern seaboard that they're looking at now we've got I think around nine in Queensland.
The first one that's going to be declared in Queensland is Callide. And what that declaration process under the Energy Act, it allows for fast tracking approval of renewable projects like they have done in Victoria when a lot of communities fought against and put in heaps of submissions through the administration tribunal, the government and the developers worked; the developers came to the government and said, well, you're not going to meet your targets on time mate.
And the government said, well, that's a massive political wish. We'll streamline the process so communities can't put in submissions to the administration tribunal. They have to now take the government to the actual Supreme Court. So that's what's happening.
That's renewable energy zones and those red dots are renewable energy, actual specific areas in Queensland. You are not in one here, but just because you're not in one here doesn't mean you won't get major renewable developments around you and they can expand renewable development zones anytime.
The cost
What's all this going to cost? Well, the net zero report in 2020, it said it's going to cost $1.5 trillion to 2030 and $7 to $9 trillion by 2060. They also, Net Zero Australia said, well, it's going to cover about 140,000 square kilometres. That's about 35 million acres or 14 million hectares and that's that best guess it's going to be covered in industrialised solar, wind, battery energy storage systems and transmission lines.
The Institute of Public Affairs, they had a go at it as well and said there was a number of different scenarios and it can be from 47 million hectares up to 109 million hectares or 32.2% of agricultural lands in Australia. I just did this download last week.
And remember, I want you to think about the step change scenario. Remember, we are only seeing the very start of industrialised renewable development in the country. We've got another two decades following this decade where it's going to keep expanding.
So this is what I did last week. I just downloaded from the alt energy where we've got 516 generating solar and wind projects across Australia at the moment, another 1,273 in development giving us a total of 789. So that's what it looks like at the moment.
Of course, they're bigger symbols than what the projects really are, but you imagine we haven't finished the tripling this decade. We've got another double, double plus the hydrogen superpower scenario. It is going to dramatically change what rural Australia looks like forever. Once it's gone, it's gone for good.
This was, I'll quickly run through. This is what they wanted to do in Gladstone at the back of Gladstone to produce 4 million tonnes a year of hydrogen. They wanted to put 10,000 wind turbines and two and a half thousand square kilometres of solar factories and use 45,000 megalitres of water.
So it's very hungry for electricity.
This is what's happening right now on our watch up behind Gladstone. This is Gladstone here.
And so what they're doing, all these wind developers, they're hunting the best wind resources and that's all up on The Great Divide and ah, that's where all our biodiversity is because it hasn't been industrialised, whether it's from agriculture or from mining. And that's where all the koalas are hanging out, the sugar gliders are hanging out. That's where all our best fauna, fauna and flora is. So you've got all this happening, all those red lines are the tracks they push in.
They're not just little tracks. It can be 60 to 70 metres wide and the black dots are all the wind turbine areas are yellow areas are solar factories. Clark Creek, second from the top, that's where they blasted off 1.3 million cubes off the top of The Great Divide and side these big things in.
Now there's a real regulatory unbalance where as mining or as farming, we've got heaps of legislation like the Vegetation Act, like the reef regulations, like the Nature Conservation Act, where wind developers, solar developers haven't. They've got a code, they've got to work to submit a plan, but they're exempt from the bulk of the legislation.
[audience interruption] So they can destroy what farmers and ...
Well they can, but it's for the "community good," and they can offset it. They can offset it. So this is just Clark Creek where you see that's just the lines where they're pushing all the track, the white dots.
That's an overlay of the Queensland Vegetation Management Act where all the green is uncleared, the yellow and purple is also endangered and of concern. They're allowed to do that. This is a video I took. This is just on an industrial development at Bundaberg.
You notice it's all cleared,
[video] More disruption brought to you by the renewable energy industry. They're all clean and green apparently.
Now that's straight out the back of residential allotments, rural residential of 20 acres. This fence was put in and the person who owned this property wasn't even contacted. She doesn't live there. She lives a couple of hours away. She came and her front fence was removed. A dozer had pushed a track in through the trees, knocked down her fence and put the security fence up. How's that for knocking on your property rights?
I do talk about, [video] we had a solar factory installation at the back of Michelle's place just looking at the destruction of the native vegetation and look at all the exposed soil as they go around thumping all these posts in the site, the wind that the solar panels on, absolutely disgusting. And then you get a fence. Michelle just arrived here one day and bang, a fence was gone. This was up. No consultation at all.
So imagine that just happening and imagine it's stops the movement of native animals from one side where there is trees. How are a lot of marsupials going to get through that fence? Is that even talked about? How are you going to get in and fight a fire quickly? Is that even talked about?
We've done a few surveys across the main states of the national energy system and they've come back with some damning evidence that government really isn't good at consultation. It really aligns with what the infrastructure commissioner's own survey did. Government departments aren't really transparent when they're talking to people.
Government departments have not listened and acted on people's concern. Energy companies have applied pressure to get onto people's places and they do. They apply pressure, they put pressure on you. "Jim, everyone else around who's signed up, you haven't signed up. If you don't sign up, well I'm just going to put it on your boundary and you'll get no payment, but you'll get all the stuff that comes with it." This is what is happening.
Farm insurance
If one of my bulls wrecked my gates and I'm out there welding it up, shouldn't be on a hot windy day, fire gets away, burns out a solar factory next door that's worth half a billion dollars. I've only got $20 million public liability insurance. Where are they going to come to? They're going to come to me and take my farm. It costs a lot of money. It would be impossible for me to get a $500 million public liability insurance cover. It's even hard to get 50 million, a hundred million. It's possible, but it costs a lot of dollars. People down in Victoria, new South Wales are experiencing this now and the government's given them no help. Are we going to rely on the developers to say, "oh no mate, we won't take you. No, just trust us."
This is the look of rural and regional people. These people are from Victoria. These are the ones that tried to stop a solar factory going right around their property. They're fourth generation I think it says. And it's been taken out of their hands because the process has been streamlined.
This person from Queensland just lives not far from me. There's a big solar factory outside of Kingaroy, 400 acres. She can't sell her house because people that want to pull up there and they have a look at the house, nice house, but then they have a look across 400 acres of black glass. What do you reckon?
But you ask the industry, "well, where's the evidence that these things are having any marked impact on property values?" Well, the evidence is there mate. You talk to a number of real estate agencies up and down the coast and they say people don't want to live next door to these. Well, would you want to live next door to one?
They do burn. These big containers do burn and they're very hard to put out that with all this lithium. And guess where they're putting all these battery energy storage systems? Up the top of the catchment! There's one going up near the bunya. What happens if we get a fire where all that contaminated water runs off?
That's the one that burnt in Geelong back in July, 2021. They had it let it burn for four days. You can't put it out with water. You've got to spray water on the surrounding containers to keep them cool. And guess what? If you do open the doors and spray water in, there's stranded energy there that you could get zapped. So where's all that toxic smoke going to go? One of these big battery energy storage systems is going to go just outside of Ipswich, apparently.
You're going to have, this is the 10k exclusion zone they had around that one in Geelong because of the toxic smoke. You'll get the toxic smoke here.
And it's not like when there is a fire in a wind turbine, you can just shimmy up in your little fire truck and put it out mate. Those hubs, some of them are 200 metres high. You got to let those babies burn. So remember a really hot high fire danger condition. We're putting all these wind turbines on top of the great dividing range.
One (in) every 300 burns. They're under so much pressure. They've got a thousand litres of hydraulic oil in the bearings. They're going to go "boom". You can't put 'em out. You're not going to get fire bombers to go in there.
Country Fire Association volunteers in Victoria saying we ain't going into any renewable development anymore. It's bloody dangerous. Why should we go and protect some foreign asset? We'll go and protect houses and farms, but we're not going to go and protect these assets because it is dangerous.
Communities are getting left behind. They haven't got the fire specialist resources to fight these fires.
This is lifted straight out of the Clark Creek (I love picking on Clark Creek) wind farm and this is the biodiversity management plan. So it goes in, if you come across a koala that's fallen out of a tree and it's pretty badly injured, you can give it a sharp blow to the base of the back of the skull with a blunt metal or wooden bar. And if you're not sure it's dead well you can actually look at taking its head off to make sure death is final. And it even says, and this is straight out of their biodiversity management plan, the experienced spotters, you've got to have the right tools, carry large crowbars or sledgehammers, make sure they're available in each car.
Now you imagine me as a farmer or a cow cocky having that in my biosecurity plan, I'd be in jail mate. But these guys, it's okay because we're saving the planet. BS, It is okay. This is just an, I'll just do it here. I'll just show you what the flicker is because these blades, depending on the length of the blades, move at about 350 kilometres an hour tip speed. So you imagine being a koala. You going to get any mammals hanging around there where a wind turbine is? Nothing is going to be there. [See 22:28 in the video]
[audience member] That would scare the crap out of everything.
And then you get the noise from the turbine. This is actually quite close to it. You get that acoustic noise and then all these tracks they're pushing up, there's 3,700 kilometres of these types of tracks they're pushing. And this is only the very start at the back of Rocky where they're pushing these tracks. And remember, these tracks are expanded.
That's the blasting they have to actually do to site these things up. That's some of the remnant vegetation that they're pushing over. It's never been cleared before.
And all this clearing goes down as clearing for agriculture in the state land asset tree server, they do every 12 months. It's captured as clearing for agriculture and all the sedimentation off these frigging roads they're doing on top of the ranges? It's captured as sedimentation coming from agricultural practises.
Audience interruption:
So the farmers are at fault for...
Jim Wilmott:
The farmers, those evil, evil farmers. [How am I going for time, Jewel?]
I just want to show you the size of these wind turbines. Check the flicker out. This is Kabam Wind Farm, 70 K southwest of Cairns. Look at the size of these. These are 200 metre towers, 100 metre blades. [see 23:53 in the video]
Now that area going through there, those three blades covers five football fields. The blades are a hundred metres in length and you've got all the red lights.
This is at Penny's place, my mate at Kaban 70 K southwest of Cairns. This is what she sees off her back verandah every night. The blinking lights is 2 Ks from this wind factory and her ceiling in her bedroom and her kitchen (is) dull red.
You imagine you'd be able to get in a yacht and sail from Brisbane and you'll start seeing these blinking lights from Fraser Island because they're putting a big wind factory in behind Fraser Island, the "Forest Wind" wind factory, all the way up past Cairns to Port Douglas.
What about the turtles? Aren't they affected by nesting turtles near Bundaberg? Our own Department of Environment and Science say, well, they're affected by light pollution. But I guess it doesn't matter In this case.
This is from Professor Wilson. He's given me permission to use this slide. This is where we're heading to. We've got all our energy sources down the left axis, along the bottom we've got a timeframe, and along the other axis we've got the kilowatts produced. And you can see he never thinks that we're going to get a hundred percent renewables up the top, the wind and solar. It'll peak at about 40% to 50%. We've got gas turbines, we've got our base hydro energy, that's quite static.
This is what I want you to look at here. See the closed the drop off of coal by mid '25 to 2040. That's the yawning gap as we - and Labour quite proudly says - you know we've got to get out of coal. We've got to close down these evil coal fired power stations before it's too late. Like, we're going to burn to death by 2030.
That's the energy gap that is approaching us. We will run out of base load power. We need base load power like we need oxygen in a modern society. It can't go up and down like this. And even businesses now in Queensland are being asked to limit their power to save the grid from collapsing. And we're only at the start of this journey.
We shouldn't be developing a grid on emissions reduction. We should be developing a grid on maintaining base load power for our society, for our industries. Because guess where industries are going? They're out of here. They're going to places like China where power is cheaper. Coal, coal, fire power, nuclear power, definitely.
So electricity is an essential service. No first world democracy can function without affordable, dependent, available 24/7 power. We need it from the community interests back, not from the power generation industries forward. It should be a power made for our society. I reckon we should eliminate all subsidies and legislation that favours one or operates another against technology.
Create a level playing field, it's certainly not that at the moment, with a choice of technology left entirely to the discretion of respective power generations.
These are some of the billboard banners that we've put out. We've got one just near Ipswich. There's one at Rocky, at Biloela, and there's one on the way out to the Borumba Pumped Hydro Project where all workers have to go past every day. So they're all talking about the pillars that the communities are trying to actually save. And these are all being donated and it's about getting the message out there.
But guess what the government did as soon as we start putting these billboards out? They spent $3 million littering the highway with 'solar and wind are cheap, the cheapest form of energy, renewables are going to save us'.
There's another one that was the one near Ipswich.
Biloela.
Always get the problem with people saying, well, Jim, we've got to do this quickly, mate. What's a few koalas and a few trees and a few communities?
And I just love showing this graph, which is the annual CO2 emissions from China since the early two thousands to 2022. That's China obviously. And then you've got India growing there. We could close down Australia's emissions and would not make one iota of difference. What the hell are we worried about these superficial targets for to get to net zero? They're worrying about all this stuff and there's things if they were so worried about the environment; look what feral pigs are doing in the environment. Look what feral cats are doing in the environment. Look at all the weed spread. Look at the fire ants.
All these things are going unnoticed.
Look at all the pests that are on our doorstep. All the exotic diseases that are going to impact our food production system. Varroa Mite is in Australia now. We've just had Fall Armyworm. They knew it was going to come five years before it ended, but did we actually start to do some preparatory work? No, we waited till it got here.
Our biosecurity systems are weak and they're putting our food production systems at risk. And then there's a plethora of
I would like to talk about, but haven't got time. There's the energy use by source in China, a very thin line. Up the top is wind and solar, bit of gas, bit of hydro, a bit of nuclear. The rest is coal and oil.
That's all I've got time for. Sorry, I've gone a bit over time, but yeah, any questions? That'd be great. Later on.
Jewel:
What did I tell you? Be afraid.
BONUS: AEMO requests powers to shut off solar power amid system collapse fears
2nd December 2024 - Sky News host Andrew Bolt says AEMO’s request for emergency power to switch off solar over concerns of system collapses is “evidence” Australia’s energy system is “falling apart”.
“More evidence today our power system is falling apart, this is appalling stuff,” Mr Bolt said.
“Last week it was New South Wales running so short of electricity, people were told don’t turn on your dishwashers, don’t turn on your washing machines, today it is the energy market operator saying, oh dear, we need to be given emergency power so we can switch off solar in every state when necessary.”
