Energy transition: Farmers fight Victoria’s powerline grab for Western Renewables Link

Australia hasn’t built transmission projects this large across farm country for decades. The projects are critical to the transition to net zero, but farmers say they’ve been ignored, taken for granted and patronised.

It is three years since a land access agent for AusNet Services first visited the Myrniong family farm of Emma and Peter Muir, an hour’s drive north-west of Melbourne, with a plan to run a 500 kilovolt transmission line across their top paddock in front of their home.

Anger and dismay are etched across their faces as they describe their battle against the backers of the 190-kilometre Western Renewables Link (WRL): AusNet, the transmission company building the link; the Australian Energy Market Operator, which manages transmission in Victoria; and the Victorian government of Daniel Andrews.

Peter and Emma Muir own a family farm in Myrniong, an hour’s drive north-west of Melbourne, and have been fighting the proposed Western Renewables Link for three years. Eamon Gallagher

The link is one of a slew of huge new transmission lines that energy experts say are vital for Australia to get its faltering clean energy transition back on track and bring clean energy from far-flung wind and solar farms to the grid that feeds big cities and industries.

Farmers such as the Muirs say they’ve been ignored, taken for granted, patronised and insulted by AusNet, AEMO and Victorian Energy Minister Lily d’Ambrosio, and this has made them only more determined to fight. They have pounced on advice from energy expert Bruce Mountain and former power executive Simon Bartlett, who say that WRL and VNI West – a second new transmission line to connect the WRL to NSW – fail cost benefit tests. They are drafting an alternative plan – based on their minority view, among experts at least – that mostly relies on enhancing existing power lines.

“I think I would have accepted that if the project was legitimate, and if the project had a benefit and we weren’t the ones paying. We’re bearing the brunt of this enormous project. And we’ve just been told to do it for the greater good. I think there’s got to be a better mix than that – especially when we did all the numbers we had credible people like Bruce Mountain look at and say this doesn’t stack up,” Emma Muir tells The Australian Financial Review at the kitchen table of their farmhouse.

“You’re thinking, ‘bugger it, I’m going to fight this’.”

The clash of interests politicians must resolve doesn’t come much starker: 23 million people on the eastern states’ grid who mostly just want the energy transition to succeed versus fewer than 1000 farmers who say their livelihoods – even their lives – may be at stake.

Still, these farmers have been doing it for generations and are far from the popular image of opponents of progress. “We’re not NIMBYs,” says Emma Muir emphatically.

The WRL would run from Sydenham on Melbourne’s north-west fringe north of Ballarat and on to Bulgana near Ararat, across some of Australia’s most fertile land, home to sheep, cattle and crop farms.

A precise path for VNI West, which has a $3.5 billion budget, has not been identified. But it would broadly run from Bulgana via a strip of land that includes Charlton and Boort through the border to join the NSW grid at Dinawan. Opposition to VNI West from farmers who learnt they might be in the path of VNI West only in February – after a change of route – is simmering too.

In NSW, Humelink, a $3.3 billion link traversing rich farmland from the Snowy 2.0 pumped hydro project to the NSW grid, also faces hostility from landowners. Of five major transmission projects included by AEMO in its Integrated System Plan, only EnergyConnect, linking the South Australian and NSW grids over remote, arid country, is under construction.

These projects are critical to the transition to net zero and the achievement of the Albanese government’s target of 82 per cent renewable energy by 2030, but it is clear something has gone badly wrong with their execution. AusNet and AEMO have conducted 550 community meetings, 350 field days and accepted 95 route changes to smooth the waters. Even so, amid signs of accelerating climate change – from shrinking polar ice sheets to record sea temperatures and brutal heatwaves in Southern Europe and the United States – more is clearly needed.

But d’Ambrosio’s change of tack hasn’t placated farmers, who know the state has last resort powers of compulsion.

She issued ministerial orders in February and May seizing control of WRL and VNI West from AEMO under extraordinary “Henry VIII” legislative powers – to use the language of the farmers’ legal documents seeking judicial reviews of the orders. The orders swept away protections on which the farmers had relied: the February order was in response to the farmers’ first action to overturn AEMO’s approval of the WRL; the order in May was in response to a second farmers’ action to quash d’Ambrosio’s grab for control.

D’Ambrosio says in the orders that the moves are necessary to accelerate construction of the power lines and facilitate an orderly energy transition. The government acknowledges via a spokeswoman that it is changing the way transmission is planned and developed in Victoria because it is “vital for securing affordable power for Victorians and enabling the development of our renewable energy industry as we work towards net zero emissions by 2045”.

In June 2020, Emma Muir got 400 affected farmers and their families to a public meeting within weeks of that first visit three years ago, complete with police looking for COVID-19 lockdown infractions. She says AusNet has engaged a crisis management expert, Kelly Parkinson, who “rings me all the time to butter me up”, and its representatives attend meetings accompanied by guards.

An AusNet spokeswoman said Parkinson was experienced in working with people to address concerns about complex energy projects. “The community have asked us to improve our engagement and this is one of the ways we are trying to do this,” she said. After “serious and credible threats to project staff ... unarmed security are sometimes present at meetings and events”.

Australia hasn’t built transmission projects this large across farm country for decades. Farmers in the path of VNI West say they’re being asked to bear an unfair burden because of political expediency, and their corridor would yield less clean energy for the grid and cost more to build than another discarded route.

Matt McGurk, who farms near Charlton with his father Trevor, says he accepts the transition has to happen but “the whole reason that the project is actually coming through this corridor now is because AEMO couldn’t get social licence on a previous corridor closer to Bendigo and Daylesford”.

“Moving it west doesn’t reduce the offensiveness of the project, they just think it offends fewer people.”

Alistair Parker, CEO of VicGrid, a state agency set up to oversee the build out of the power grid, says there was a small difference in the yield but “I don’t think it was material in terms of the decision”.

Farmers also worry the 90-metre mandatory easements and 70-metre to 80-metre towers required for 500 kV lines will interfere with modern technology such as GPS-guided machinery, spraying from manned or unmanned aerial vehicles, and the rapidly developing field of autonomous farm equipment.

Farmers meeting at the Woosang fire station last week. Eamon Gallagher

“Those things are potentially going to be stricken from the easement [at] massive cost to productivity. So, you’re not going to be able to take advantage of the developing technology,” says McGurk. Last year’s wet season required extensive aerial spraying at their property. “Whether that’s fertiliser, herbicides, fungicides, we’ve baited mice by air, slug bait, all these things, you can actually put a physical and real cost on the inability to do that,” he says.

The losses, farmers say, would not be covered by the $200,000-per-kilometre traversed over 25 years – or $8000 a year – compensation offered in Victoria.

VicGrid’s Parker says power lines may interfere with localised, specialist GPS systems but “deep technical work” can fix this. “If it doesn’t, then the compensation process should make you whole to the extent that you lose productivity,” he says. AEMO’s Landholder Guide sets out a range of separate compensation measures – beyond the $200,000 access payments – for the market value of easements, loss of farming profits and “special value”.

Other complaints range from the prosaic – devaluation of farms, impaired views across fields – to denial of insurance, potential loss of farm properties in families for generations, and matters of life and death.

In a country periodically scarred by deadly bushfires, farmers’ ability to fight fires is hardest to overlook. Firefighters aren’t permitted to fight fires on power line easements, says Tom Drife, a farmer at Glendaruel, north of Ballarat. Five fires have raged towards Glendaruel via nearby Mount Beckworth and Mount Bolton in the 20 years he’s been a member of his local volunteer Country Fire Authority branch.

“They’ve all been pulled up on the [proposed WRL] easement,” Drife says. The worst conditions – hot northerlies turning westerly and eventually southerly – can quickly whip up massive fires “to such a scale that it gets really hard to put out”.

CFA procedures require crews to pull back from power lines when visibility is impaired by smoke. “We can’t fight under the power lines but when we can’t see them, we’ve got to drop back to our firm reference points, which is really only roads and can be kilometres back,” Drife says. “The fire issue’s actually life and death.”

Euan Ferguson, a former CFA chief officer and local farmer, says construction works, vehicles and increased access are all sources of ignition, and it isn’t clear how aircraft can operate around 80-metre towers. Ferguson and the McGurks were among a dozen farmers who gathered at the Woosang Fire Station near Wedderburn at the invitation of Graham Nesbitt, a local Victorian Farmers’ Federation branch president, last Wednesday to voice their opposition to VNI West.

Cherie and Tom Drife, who farm at Glendaruel, north of Ballarat, at their local Country Fire Authority station, with fire-prone bushland in background. Eamon Gallagher

“The lack of a coherent response around fire management is just startling,” Ferguson says. “At the very least they should be engaging with CFA and maybe [the state firefighting agency] and getting a plan for how to deal with this because at the end of the day, the land landowner is still going to bear that responsibility. So the question is who is going to take the responsibility for increased fire risk?”

All these questions have been asked, but no answers have been forthcoming, says Nesbitt. The AusNet spokeswoman acknowledged community concern about impacts on fire fighting. “There are 6500 kilometres of existing transmission lines that are highly regulated to ensure they are designed, maintained and operated safely to prevent fire ignition,” she said. (Most of these lines are 220kV or less, and require smaller towers and narrower easements than 500kV power lines.)

AusNet’s spokeswoman says: “We work with Emergency Management Victoria and the CFA to ensure aerial firefighting can operate in the vicinity of high-voltage transmission lines. We are engaging with the CFA in relation to this project and the potential impacts on fire risk.”

The Muirs have at least had the power line traversing their property reduced from 4½ kilometres to about 1 kilometre and moved away from their farmhouse. Peter Muir says he might be able to live with that, although they want the line run underground as well. But the power line’s new path now intrudes more on a neighbour’s property, and those neighbours no longer talk to the Muirs.

“How are we going to be able to change that?” he asks.

Not so lucky are Barb and Glenn Ford, among the last broadacre farmers in the “green wedge” between Melton and Melbourne Airport. The WRL will cut their property diagonally in half, and the 80-metre towers will loom higher than nearby Mount Kororoit. What stumps them is that their son wasn’t allowed to build a two-storey house in its shadow or use bright colours because of a “significant landscape” overlay.

“We’ve watched the urban growth come out towards us. We know we can’t stop it. But the transmission line is just like another nail in our coffin,” Barb Ford says. “I’ve been asked why haven’t we asked AusNet what would be the least impact for us? But if I suggest the least impact, it’s going to impact one of our neighbours.”

Ford would also like the line to run underground, but Transgrid says this would be significantly more costly to build and for energy producers to connect into. She’s also worried about the impact on farm productivity as more and more energy infrastructure crisscrosses the landscape. Farmers generally fret that the vast amount of infrastructure needed for the transition would impair “food bowl” production.

Barb Ford, who farms with husband Glenn at Plumpton in the green wedge between Melton and Melbourne Airport. Eamon Gallagher

At Melton Air Services, the WRL misses the airfield, but owner Evan Reeves says it would still affect pilots’ ability to take off and land safely. An aviation survey found some towers just off the airfield would exceed safe heights. AusNet’s representative complimented Reeves on the view but thought the surveyor was mistaken, and asked if Reeves would prefer the towers or sagging lines between them aligned with his two main runways. Reeves wasn’t impressed with either option: a loss of power on takeoff would pose an invidious choice for pilots.

Reeves, who isn’t in line for compensation because there are no towers on his land, says he is hearing plenty of arguments why he should live with it, but “I am not really getting heard on why they shouldn’t do it”.

Tom Drife’s bank gave his farm a $1.5 million haircut when he pledged it for a loan to buy a nearby property, and he hasn’t been able to get answers to questions about compensation. “We intend to follow every angle through as far as we possibly can. We’re not against it. We’re happy to have it come through underground,” Drife says.

Peter Muir says he’s been so stressed he’s had to take Diazepam to sleep. Members of other farmers’ families say the stress of dealing with the projects could exacerbate mental health problems, which are already worse among farmers than in the wider population.

Melton Air Services’ Evan Reeves. Eamon Gallagher

Minister d’Ambrosio’s grab for control of the power line projects will accelerate their progress if it is upheld by Victoria’s Supreme Court, which will hear the farmers’ case in September. Emma Muir says she’s heard “indirectly from the minister’s office that she doesn’t care – that the government is prepared to take a hit”. (The minister’s office did not respond to this.)

“These people aren’t going to sit down. It’s going to get really nasty. You are talking to people who have, like my husband, been here for generations. It’s not just a place to work. It’s in your blood. It’s so important. It’s part of who you are ... your children’s future and their children’s future,” Emma Muir says.

“These families along here – I hate to say it, but they will fight to the death, won’t they? They will blockade them – it will be very, very nasty.”

Some of this implacable hostility sounds overdone, some is misguided – due to a lack of information – and some may be bluster aimed at maximising compensation. After all, city dwellers have to live with freeways, large apartment blocks and other noisy infrastructure. But much of the angst is genuine, and the battle has months if not years to run. The energy transition may depend on whether a workable solution can be found.

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