This week we discuss Australia's recent cancellation of wind projects due to political changes and community opposition, the complexities of grid interconnects, and the need for strategic renewable energy planning.

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You are listening to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast brought to you by build turbines.com. Learn, train, and be a part of the Clean Energy Revolution. Visit build turbines.com today. Now here's your hosts, Allen Hall, Joel Saxum, Phil Totaro, and Rosemary Barnes. 

Well, welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. I am Allen Hall and I'm here with Rosemary Barnes, who's fresh from. Sweden, she just traveled all around the world to record this episode. Uh, Phil Totaro is out in California and Joel Saxum is up in the cold north of Wisconsin. And we, we've been just discussing off air. All the craziness has been happening in the wind industry.

And I, I have to admit, you know, I thought last week was. Insane. Well, we just, uh, put it on steroids. So not only are we canceling a lot of projects in the United States currently, we're all, we're starting to be cancel [00:01:00] them on Australia and over in Queensland. The Queensland Deputy Premier, uh, has used his ministerial powers to refuse planning approval for the moonlight range when Farm Near Rock Hampton.

Now I, and I'm sure I murdered that name Rosemary, so please forgive me, but it was gonna have 88 turbines in about 450 megawatts of capacity, enough to power about a quarter million homes in Australia and tied with, it's about 300 construction jobs and 10 permanent positions to make that wind farm go.

But there's was like a two month public consultation period that happened. And during that consultation period, about 80 per 90% of the local residents, and when I say local residents are about 150 local residents, uh, replied back and were concerned about some of the, the known people that are gonna be there because it's gonna like double the population, right.

And 300 construction workers in a, an area of 140 people, 150 people. Uh, and based on [00:02:00] that boom, perhaps the, the project was canceled. What is happening in Queensland that we need to understand that projects just kinda get wiped away like that with 140 people, 150 people chiding in. 

Rosemary Barnes: So what's happened is that the Queensland government, the Queensland State Government, it was labor for quite a while and they had, uh, renewables targets and net zero targets and stuff like that.

And then, um, the government changed last year, so now there's a, a liberal government, which means conservative in Australia. They're in power and they wanted to change their planning regulations. But what is a bit weird is that they wanna do it retroactively. So they've changed the rules in April, and now they're going through projects that have already been approved to see if they meet the new rules rather than the rules at the time that they were approved.

But the weirdest thing is that I'm pretty sure that this specific wind farm that they revoked, they were the ones to approve it shortly after [00:03:00] they came into government. They approved this wind farm and then they changed the rules a few months later, and then they did a new round of community consultation.

Um. And they say that 85% of local residents were, um, you know, in favor of reassessing. The issue is that now we're at this stage of the energy transition where, you know, we're up over 40% renewables across Australia. Um, that's primarily wind and solar.