Victoria is just not big enough to fit all the solar and wind industrial plants
It’s no wonder the Victorian government is desperate to begin building offshore wind turbines. Their own targets for the forced transition are so crazy-brave, they would “need” to use as much as two thirds of the state’s agricultural land instead. It sounds delusional but they told us this straight up in their own policy document released in March 2022.
Thanks to Aidan Morrison at the Centre for Independent Studies, who not only reads these boring tomes, but also noticed that they quietly disappeared the Victorian Offshore Wind Policy Directions Paper. He explained in The Australian that he believes they hid it because they’ve realized how embarrassing it looks.
Apparently 227,000 square kilometers is not enough land to power 7 million people in a NetZero world.
Victorian planners had farmland in their sights (as if it was their own). They mapped it out and described it as “available for onshore renewables”.
If farmers were not aware of the totalitarian disregard the NetZero bureaucrats have for farmers, they know now.
Think about the captive mindset it takes to publish a ludicrous document like this without blinking? These are people who never meet a skeptic. Whoever wrote and approved it didn’t even try to hide the ghastly cost of building wind and solar power onshore. And they certainly didn’t spend a nanosecond imagining what Victorian farmers might think of it. (Or checking their own maths — 70% of agricultural land is not the same as “four times the area of Greater Melbourne”.)
Presumably some bureaucrats were tasked with justifying the big Offshore wind developments and it didn’t even cross their minds that “Net Zero” is a option, a frivolous quest, and that farmers, and everyone (outside the party room) might just say “No”.
Billions of dollars are on the table and no one even reads the policy documents. We live in an era of distilled incompetence.
The Bottom Line:
Victoria is supposedly aiming to be 95% renewable by 2035, and at this point gets about 50% of it’s electricity from fossil fuels (and even more of it’s total energy). Even after the mass installation of unreliable energy for the last ten years Victoria needs to build 15 times as much to reach its target.
There are no offshore wind farms in Australia, and the federal government just put a poleaxe through the offshore plans of the Victorian government. But around the world investors are running away, share prices are falling, and insurance firms are balking at the million dollar cost of repairing the cables.
Now would be the perfect time for Australia to get out of offshore wind — right before it gets into it.
Victoria farmers won’t be pleased,
If their lands are confiscated or seized,
For vast solar panel fields,
Decimating food yields,
Nor by wind turbine pipe dreams appeased.
–Ruairi
REFERENCES
The original government source page contains the dead link. Luckily for us the Wayback Machine captured the site and the PDF.
Image by Mystic Art Design from Pixabay