Wednesday, 31 August 2022

Renewable energy

Mr QUILTY (Northern Victoria) (18:48): (2110) My adjournment matter is for the minister for the environment. While on a trip through Northern Victoria earlier this month I had discussions with a farmer who wants to build a wind farm on his property. The problem is getting the power back to the grid. His solution was to use the railway corridors for high-voltage powerlines—rail corridors that have been abandoned due to city governments shutting down the rural rail network. This got me thinking that if these corridors can be used in our regional areas, we should also be looking to use them in Melbourne. We could place wind towers and solar panels along railway corridors and road reserves in the city. Instead of crossing regional Victoria in a 100-metre-high network of steel spider webs, the city high-voltage powerlines would not have far to run to where the energy is used.

Melbourne consumes the vast majority of power in Victoria and is responsible for the emission of the vast bulk of our CO₂. Despite that, there seems to be a distinct lack of wind farms in Melbourne and of solar farms, which swallow up agricultural land with their short-life, non-recyclable, toxic waste-spewing panels. Out of the 34 operating wind farms in Victoria, there is exactly zero per cent in Melbourne, and I do not think your share of solar farms is much higher. All things being equal, shouldn’t Melbourne have its fair share of giant windmills dominating the horizons and mincing the pigeons? There is certainly great concern in the green leafy teal suburbs regarding global warming. Perhaps a wind farm can be built on Brighton Beach and another on the larger St Kilda Beach. I am sure that no city-based squatter of Victoria’s Energiewende wants to be seen as a nimby who is not prepared to pull their own weight.

Every inner-city and suburban park could have its own wind tower rising up over the red-tiled roofs and its own landfill site for the used wind sails as well. It would give city kids an up-close-and-personal view of what green energy looks like, and if the bulk of the green grass in the park has to go to make room for the concrete base, well, we all have to make sacrifices. Of course if we wanted to be rational, we could instead embark on building a handful of sensibly sited small-footprint nuclear plants in place of the coal plants you are shutting down, but there is no rationality in our renewable energy fever dreams, is there?

Minister, the action I seek is for you to ensure that Melbourne gets its fair share of the green energy generation infrastructure in public parks and road and rail corridors. In this brave new energy world we all need to pull our weight. Regional Victoria should not have to bear all the costs.