The grand vision of a renewable energy revolution is crumbling before our eyes, and it’s time to face the hard truths. But here’s where it gets controversial: what if the very foundation of this transition—its engineering, economics, and social impact—has been built on shaky ground from the start? Let’s dive into a story that begins with a man who saw the flaws long before they became impossible to ignore.
My father-in-law was a rare breed—a scientist with dirt under his fingernails and a farmer who could dissect complex systems. Two decades ago, he became one of the first landowners in New South Wales approached by wind energy developers. They arrived at his property in Nimmitabel, southeast of Cooma, brimming with enthusiasm and questions, eyeing the high ridgeline near the Great Dividing Range. But he wasn’t swayed by their optimism. Over family dinners, he’d recount how he ‘chased them off the place’ with two simple yet profound questions that left them speechless. At a time when renewables were meant to complement, not replace, traditional energy systems, he saw the absurdity of plugging small, intermittent power sources into a grid designed for large, reliable ones. ‘Plainly nonsensical,’ he called it. His second question was equally blunt: who would clean up the mess when he was gone? These weren’t rhetorical queries—they were warnings.
Fast forward to today, and we’re chasing an 82% renewables target without clear answers to those very questions. And this is the part most people miss: the national energy transition has been more improvised than designed, fueled by political slogans and activist fervor rather than rigorous planning. The phrase ‘Rewiring the Nation’ might sound visionary in Canberra, but to anyone familiar with rural Australia, it’s laughable. The idea of crisscrossing a continent with tens of thousands of kilometers of transmission lines—through farms, forests, and national parks—was never properly costed, mapped, or tested. It was faith masquerading as policy.
Governments and agencies have been playing catch-up, outsourcing pieces of the puzzle to bodies like AEMO, CSIRO, and Net Zero Australia. Yet, no one has stitched together a comprehensive plan. Bureaucracies and state energy corporations have simply marched forward on modeled assumptions, while market bodies gave their nods. Labor, true to form, has overreached spectacularly, setting wild renewables targets and letting the project be hijacked by plutocrats, activists, and funders with vested interests—none of whom had expertise in energy engineering or grid economics. The result? Political grandstanding with little practical detail.
When Malcolm Turnbull once described the energy transition as a matter of ‘engineering and economics,’ he meant it as a reassuring technical challenge. But irony has turned that phrase against large-scale renewables. It’s the engineering and economics that are now exposing the cracks—not just in Australia, but globally.
When our leaders tout Australia’s ‘unlimited wind and solar resources,’ they conveniently omit a critical detail: these resources are thinly spread across a vast continent. Harnessing them isn’t free. It demands an engineering marvel unlike anything attempted before—thousands of kilometers of transmission lines, industrial-scale renewable zones, and massive storage capacity that doesn’t yet exist. In 2023, the Net Zero Australia consortium estimated that full decarbonization would require the equivalent of five Tasmanias of land for solar farms alone. But even that staggering figure underestimated the total footprint once transmission, storage, and additional wind are factored in. And with surging energy-demand projections, the real number is closer to seven to ten Tasmanias. Here’s the kicker: while the facts have changed, the zealotry hasn’t. Instead of recalibrating, governments and investors are doubling down. Are we really going to sacrifice our farmland, ridgelines, and open country to an industrial glare?
The past week has been a wake-up call. Australia’s largest smelter, Tomago Aluminium, warned it can’t secure affordable power under the transition. Bill Gates echoed Bjorn Lomborg, stating climate change won’t end civilization. Inflation data showed energy prices driving the rise, while Reuters highlighted Australia’s severe renewable power curtailment as a warning to Asian grids. By the weekend, the National Party had abandoned net zero altogether. Meanwhile, Professor Dieter Helm of Oxford University delivered a sobering critique, noting that governments are locking in high costs, creating fragile systems, and doubling grid sizes for the same output. The irony? They’re also shielding customers from potential benefits of low gas prices. Sound familiar?
In New South Wales, the disaster is unfolding in real-time. The Central West Orana Renewable Energy Zone, the government’s flagship project, has ballooned in costs, swallowing billions in public funding and political capital. Like Snowy 2.0 and HumeLink, it may proceed simply because too much has been invested. But the madness doesn’t stop there. The New England REZ, still years from construction, has seen transmission line route changes that bring fresh disruption, uncertainty, and questions about integrity. It cuts through some of the nation’s best farmland, with each revision bringing new environmental impacts and decimated properties. Watch the New Englanders fight back.
Every large-scale renewables project now relies on price guarantees through the so-called ‘Capacity’ Investment Scheme—the only such scheme in the world to include renewables. The price? Secret, hidden from public scrutiny and parliamentary oversight. That this has gone so far, with departments and consortia advancing opaque schemes of such scale, is both laughable and alarming. The coalition’s silence on this is unfathomable.
For those of us in rural areas, the consequences are stark. The energy transition has become a rolling imposition on our landscapes and communities—people never consulted but now expected to host infrastructure for the virtue-signaling of city elites. What the architects of this project failed to grasp is that, for many rural Australians, our wealth isn’t in property booms but in the beauty of where we live. Our horizon lines, our space, our silence—these are the treasures city dwellers only glimpse on weekends. That trade-off is being shattered. Farmland views are being replaced by fields of glass and steel, ridgelines by transmission towers. The visual and emotional integrity of rural Australia is being sacrificed by those who will never see it, in pursuit of an energy ideal they can’t control.
Just a few years ago, Chris Bowen and others spoke of the need for ‘social licence.’ That language has vanished. There’s a growing realization that they’ll never win public consent for the industrialization of rural landscapes. As support slips away, the project is taking an authoritarian turn—compulsory acquisitions, rushed approvals, and appeals to ‘urgency’ and ‘national interest’ to override community and environmental concerns.
Equally indefensible is the refusal to address the back end of the transition: decommissioning and rehabilitation. Every serious resources project in Australia requires rehabilitation bonds, yet no such requirement exists for large-scale solar or wind developers. In two decades, those panels will rot in paddocks, leaving a cleanup bill far beyond what landholders or taxpayers can bear.
Australia is the last developed nation to realize that large-scale renewables, at this scale, aren’t delivering as promised. Costs are soaring, timelines are exploding, and social licence is dead. My father-in-law’s questions weren’t rhetorical—they were the insights of a scientist and a farmer who knew the difference between theory and reality. Two decades later, those questions remain unanswered.
The great renewables fantasy is unravelling daily. For those of us in the regions, who saw through its false promises from the start, it can’t come soon enough. But here’s the real question: Are we willing to pause, reassess, and demand a plan that works for everyone—or will we continue down a path that sacrifices our landscapes, communities, and economic stability for an ideal that’s already failing? Let’s hear your thoughts in the comments.
