Greens vs wind
Environmentalists face up to the dirtier side of clean energy
The romanceless love affair between climate activists and big green energy is over in Scandinavia. The green movement could only tolerate the renewable industry's environmental indiscretions for so long. The trampling of the human rights of the indigenous Sami people and the threat to the existence of the reindeer herds proved to be the final straw. The Green movement says the wind turbines must be dismantled and nuclear used instead.
The global impact of this messy divorce is substantial, but it has received next to no coverage outside of Norway and Sweden. It messes with the comfortable narrative that renewable energy is the clean guy who wakes up every morning not to make profits but to make the world a better place.
Meanwhile, as some rural communities in Australia have learned to their discomfort, the environmental damage wrought by wind turbine and solar panel construction is immense. The earth is obliged to give way to the rapacious demand for minerals. The proliferation of lithium mines on the edge of outback Western Australia has the feel of a 19th-century gold rush but is far larger and dirtier.
Lithium mining often requires extensive land disturbance, including removing vegetation, topsoil and rock layers. Local ecosystems are disrupted, and sensitive habitats destroyed. Large volumes of water are needed, often in regions of water scarcity. Extraction techniques such as brine mining can lead to water depletion and potential contamination, affecting surface and groundwater quality. Miners must guard against releasing sulfuric acid and hydrochloric acid into the environment.
Yet tree huggers appear to be an endangered species around Kalgoorlie, which is to lithium-ion batteries what Dallas was to oil. The green workforce we've been promised is on the job dressed in high-vis gear driving bulldozers and trucks.
If the green movement were fair dinkum, it would only be a matter of time before it started paying attention and getting its renewable energy mates to clean things up. It might usefully redeploy its front-line troops from disrupting law-abiding city commuters and dispatch them to Far North Queensland, where they can engage in some old-school tree hugging.
They could start at the proposed Upper Burdekin wind farm site where Andrew Forrest's company Windlab concedes that there will be “unavoidable” consequences for several threatened and endangered species if the development proceeds.
The public environmental report says the wind farm will result in the removal of 662 hectares (ha) of Sharman's rock wallaby habitat, 746 ha of koala habitat, 709 ha of northern greater glider habitat, and 754 ha of red goshawk habitat, in an area larger than the Melbourne CBD.
Similar conflicts between native flora and fauna and renewable energy mega-projects are coming to a head from Tasmania to Cape York as federal and state governments pursue accelerated targets for decarbonising the electricity grid. The destruction of landscapes, disruption of farming and disturbance to local communities cannot be avoided, given the amount of land required to generate grid-scale power from dilute energy sources and inherently inefficient conversion. The technology behind wind turbines is at least 3000 years old: the world's flimsiest fluid (air) by the least-efficient energy converter (a propeller).
The encroachment of wind turbines on land in Norway, on which the Sámi people have herded reindeer for centuries, has convinced the country's green movement that they need another solution to climate change.
Greta Thunberg and members of Norway's Sámi community staged a demonstration in Oslo in March, shutting down parts of the government to protest "green colonialism." The protest was sparked by the government's disregard for a Supreme Court ruling that found that the wind farm violated the rights of the Sámi people, explicitly impacting the grazing areas for their reindeer.
In March, the Norwegian government relented. Energy Minister Terje Aasland met some of the Sámi reindeer herders, accepted the Supreme Court ruling and apologised for the licensing conditions, which he said had caused "a substantive negative impact on the ability of the Sámi reindeer herders to enjoy their own culture." The fate of the 200-metre turbines isn't decided but the activists want them demolished and the land rehabilitated.
The confrontation underscores the delicate balance between addressing climate change and upholding natural biodiversity and human rights protections. Some voices, such as Frederic Hauge, the founder of Norwegian environmental group Bellona, argue that sacrifices must be made to nature to combat climate change effectively. However, the misanthropic dogmatists have been losing ground to green pragmatists in Europe since Russia invaded Ukraine, disrupting gas supplies and highlighting the risks of heavy dependency on intermittent renewable energy.
In Finland, the Green Party is embracing nuclear energy which has generated half the nation's power since the Olkiluoto 3 reactor was switched on in March. It is not only more reliable but cheaper. The average monthly bill fell from 80 euros a megawatt hour in February to 26.5 euros in May.
Last week, the centre-right government in Sweden paved the way for constructing modular nuclear reactors by changing its target from "100% renewable" to "100% fossil-free". It forecasts that the amount of electricity generated must double if the country is to meet its net-zero emissions target by 2045. Such rapid scaling up cannot be achieved through expanding hydroelectricity since the infrastructure takes years to build, and the quantity of water is finite, even in Sweden.
It certainly cannot be achieved with wind and solar. SMRs, on the other hand are flexible, relatively cheap, and easy to scale up once the first unit has been installed.
When the debate finally turns in Australia, as it must, there are few better examples than Scandinavia to show what must be done. The region already has some of the cleanest energy systems in the world. The electricity powering NSW and Queensland emits more tonnes of carbon in an hour than the Norwegian and Swedish grids do in 24 hours.
They have governments that appreciate how much the electrification of transport and other sectors will increase demand on the grid. Norway leads the world in the adoption of electric vehicles. A quarter of cars on the road are plug-ins.
Last but not least, it is the pragmatic Scandinavian green movement which appears less focused on personal self-aggrandisement and more on getting the job done.