If you ask Paul and Andrea Sturgess how much their view is worth, the answer is: priceless. To the electricity transmission network operator Transgrid, it’s less than $800,000.
Their property beside the Blowering Reservoir in southern New South Wales is a uniquely Australian sight. Big brushstrokes of wattle creep up the ridge, clumps of yellow sitting between burnt-out gums – a legacy of the black summer bushfires of 2019-20.
The Sturgess farm, where they run cattle and harvest eucalyptus oil, has been in Paul’s family since the 1950s. There were two electricity connections through it when he inherited it. He and Andrea don’t want any more.
“These lines went in in the 70s and I’ve lived with them ever since,” he says. “And there’s not a day goes by that the lines don’t affect me somehow.
“Either I see them or I hear them or I’m trying to do something in the paddock, plough a paddock, move the cattle, and those lines are in the road.”
The Sturgesses are part of an increasingly agitated argument over how Australia will embrace the clean energy needed to respond to the climate crisis and what that means for its natural landscape.
The federal government has set a goal of 82% of electricity coming from renewable energy by 2030, up from about 35% today. This transformation, replacing ageing and failing coal plants with solar and windfarms and back-up energy storage, is necessary to meet its climate targets and set up Australia for a zero emissions future.
Its path to get there is based on advice from the Australian Energy Market Operator, which has laid out a blueprint involving a series of major new electricity connections between the five eastern states. The operator estimates the country needs more than 10,000km of new transmission lines and a ninefold increase in large-scale wind and solar energy.
To achieve this, the federal government has committed $20bn in low-cost finance for “rewiring the nation”. State governments in New South Wales, Victoria and Queensland have announced their own renewable energy targets, including carving out new zones for development that have to be connected to the power grid. It is a huge collective undertaking being managed by a mix of national and state electricity agencies and business.
At the moment, the rewiring and renewable energy rollout is struggling. Analyses suggest the pace of construction and connection will need to at least double if the country is to get near the 2030 target, and political debate has turned to whether the life of some coal plants should be extended.
There are also pockets of opposition to the rewiring project that extend beyond traditional renewable energy blockers in the federal Nationals party room. Issues raised include concern about a lack of effective community consultation during planning, confusion over inconsistent compensation arrangements and questions about how best to limit the impact on farming land and nature.
Overground v underground
The Sturgesses are particularly worried about increasing fire risk. Damage from the 2019-20 fires sits like a black blanket across all sides of the hill on the property – a reminder of the impact of extreme events exacerbated by the current reliance on fossil fuels.
Paul points west to where the sun will soon be setting and remembers how he and Andrea watched as a fireball jumped 3km and landed on the transmission lines, which within minutes had carried the blaze 20km. “It came straight up that line, just like a funnel,” he says.
The Sturgesses’ property is on the proposed path for HumeLink, a 360km connection between the planned Snowy 2.0 expansion in the Mount Kosciuszko national park to Bannaby, north-west of Goulburn.
They are strongly opposed, believing it would put them at greater risk, and have joined a campaign for the lines to be buried – a proposal that is the focus of a state parliamentary inquiry.
“If they are underground, it wouldn’t be a problem,” Paul says.
The Sturgesses are part of an alliance of about 160 NSW farmers opposing the power lines and refusing to allow Transgrid access to their properties. It’s a standoff that could lead to compulsory acquisition, in which they would be forced to host the infrastructure.
Transgrid says overhead transmission is the quickest and cheapest way to deliver what is needed. The state government is offering compensation – a set amount that landholders have been told not to reveal, plus $200,000 per kilometre of line.
It is a similar story in other states – $200,000 a kilometre in Victoria and $300,000 in Queensland. But this has not been enough to sway some opponents. Landholders say the lines will make it harder to farm, devalue properties, disrupt views and destroy ecosystems.
“We don’t want the $200,000,” Andrea Sturgess says. “Put it into undergrounding.”
Farther north, about 14km from Tumut, the Lucas family – Harry and Jan, and their daughter Jessie Reynolds – are refusing to allow Transgrid on their land despite being offered $1m. Reynolds says: “There’s not a monetary figure on this place. It’s a family farm.”
The Lucas property is sheltered by the Snowy Mountains. It backs on to a national park and sits at the bottom of a valley so picturesque it was recently used as the backdrop for a car advertisement.
Harry Lucas says it’s the best land in the country. He worries about the loss of hundreds of trees they have planted over generations, and that the transmission lines would stop them being able to fertilise their property evenly by plane.
“We don’t want to sound like whinging friggin’ farmers, but it’s our life,” he says. “They’re just industrialising fertile rural farming land – the most fertile land in Australia.”
The family also objects to how Transgrid has handled the consultation. Jan Lucas says they have been told to take the money or they won’t get anything. Her daughter says: “It’s bully tactics … You can’t talk to your neighbour about what you’re getting paid.
“They say ‘the nextdoor neighbour is fine with it’, but you don’t know. It’s divide and conquer.”
Concern over HumeLink is not restricted to the impact on farming. Jess Campbell, the chair of the Riverina Highlands Landcare Network, says the proposed route would affect critically endangered and threatened species, including the Macquarie perch, the Booroolong frog and the box-gum grassy woodland.
She says the latter is home to 14 rare birds, including the hooded robin and diamond firetail. Some small woodland birds will not fly more than 50 metres in the open for fear of predators, and the wide easements required for powerlines risk confining threatened species to small habitats that are unviable for their long-term survival, Campbell says.
“We’re all for renewables, but you’re sacrificing the environment for the environment,” Campbell says. “There’s got to be some balancing, as opposed to just going to the most cost-effective format.”
Like the Sturgesses and Lucases, Campbell says going underground would be a better option. “Obviously, underground and overground both have an impact on the environment,” she says. “You’re going to dig underground so you are going to clear the land still, but the impact is minimised and then able to be recovered.”
Transgrid hopes to finish HumeLink by mid-2026.
A company spokesperson said it had been engaging with the community since early this year, including sending information packs to landowners who may be affected, holding information sessions and extending the consultation period after receiving feedback.
“We encourage everybody with an interest in the project to attend a community information day to ask questions of the project team and have their say by lodging a submission.”
The spokesperson said the proposed transmission links were “actionable projects” in the government’s plan and were urgently needed to ensure the power grid remained secure as ageing coal plants retired. They said putting transmission lines underground would double the cost, at a minimum, and delay the projects by several years.
‘They’re buggering up my world’
In Victoria, a similar fight is under way, centred on whether the proposed 800km VNI West interconnector, a planned link between Victoria and New South Wales, is the best way ahead. On Tuesday, a line of dozens of tractors were part of a protest outside state parliament in Melbourne objecting to the route running through their properties.
Some of them argued for an alternative plan proposed by the Victoria Energy Policy Centre, which supports using existing transmission links to connect to new offshore windfarms and greater battery storage, rather than interstate transmission lines.
The Australian Energy Market Operator, which manages the national grid, has rejected the proposal, saying it would not provide what was needed to all parts of the state, particularly the north-west, would require the demolition of people’s homes to widen the existing transmission path, and would threaten the power supply to towns during construction.
The Victorian energy minister, Lily D’Ambrosio, says VNI West will unlock 3.4 gigawatts of the new renewable generation needed in the state, citing Aemo’s analysis.
Farmers at parliament said they felt unheard, and were concerned about the impact on their properties.
Tom Drife, a farmer at Glendaruel, north of Ballarat, says his newly built home will look out on to the interconnector, and banks have estimated the lines will shave $1.4m off the value of his property. He stores 30,000 tonnes of grain on his property as part of a share-farming business, and worries the lines will increase fire risk and make the place uninsurable.
“Our insurance man said at the minute we’re happy insuring you, you don’t have the power lines, but it will basically come down to risk assessment,” Drife says. “If we can’t get insurance, we can’t even run that part of our business.”
Closer to Melbourne, Barb and Glenn Ford say the transmission lines for the western renewable link will intrude on their farm near Melton, which is already being slowly surrounded by the city. Barb Ford says it will make it more difficult to spray fertiliser and operate large machinery.
“We’re not far from the substation and to get to where they’re going they’ve actually had to diagonally cut right through the middle of our 800-acre property,” Barb Ford says. “We believe it’s a fairly significant impact for us.”
Glenn Ford says if people want overhead lines on their property “let them go ahead … But they’re buggering up my world.”
‘No simple solutions’
For Narromine cotton and wheat farmer Karin Stark, who is also a renewables consultant, the problem that all this is trying to address – the climate crisis – is an everyday reality. She hasn’t had a crop in 18 months.
“Farmers are already seeing those climatic impacts on their properties. It’s not a future thing any more,” she says.
Stark is taking the solution into her own hands, working on a project with the Energy Charter, an organisation made up of energy chief executives looking at the viability of undergrounding power lines.
But she says part of the problem is that no one knows how expensive it would be. There has been no clear communication about why building transmission lines over people’s heads was a better option, she says.
“We need renewables, and that large scale [that is being built] is going to get us the pace and scale that we need to keep the lights on,” she says. “[But] the outcome has to be best for the communities and the region’s environment.”
Energy analysts believe governments to rethink their approach, warning the country will otherwise miss its renewable energy target.
Dylan McConnell, a renewable energy and energy systems analyst at the University of New South Wales, says the argument over energy infrastructure has become “incredibly challenging and fraught” with “not a lot of space for nuance”.
He suggests policymakers take a risk management approach that keeps other options – including more small and large-scale energy storage – open, and acknowledges the social and regulatory barriers facing some transmission projects.
He says cost blowouts have made the viability of some developments – such as the Marinus Link between Victoria and Tasmania – questionable. “It can be simultaneously true that we need transmission, but we don’t need some of the projects that have been proposed,” he says. “There are no simple solutions.”
McConnell says the country needs more policy to drive rapid construction of solar and wind and faster closure of coal plants.
Tony Wood, the energy and climate change program director at the Grattan Institute, agrees. He says federal and state governments need to agree on how to encourage investment in clean energy and the firm generation needed to back it up, and suggests the best idea could be to extend the safeguard mechanism – a policy to cut pollution at industrial sites – to power plants.
And he says there should be a recognition that the $20bn dedicated to rewiring the nation can not deliver what is needed on transmission on its own because the main barriers are planning and regulation, not low-cost finance.
“What we’re doing now is not going to get us there,” he says. “We need a fundamental change in the way we’re doing it and that won’t come without pain.”
