The 8,000-worker town that was never built and what it tells us about the renewables vs biodiversity debate

Eighty Mile Beach is a spectacular isolated piece of WA’s coastline that could have had a large new town servicing a massive renewable energy project. (Murray Foubister, Spectacular sunset on 80 Mile Beach, CC BY-SA 2.0 DEED)

It would have been halfway along the lonely stretch between tourist mecca Broome and the iron ore shipping capital of Port Hedland.

A new town for 8,000 workers, their families and all the services and additional people you would need for such a population in Australia’s remote North West region.

A town built using the latest in sustainability principles to service one of the world’s largest renewable energy projects which covers more than 6,500 square kilometres of spinifex-dominated sand plains.

With a 26 gigawatt capacity — which is enough energy to meet a third of Australia’s demand in 2020 — the Australian Renewable Energy Hub wind and solar project would have created green hydrogen and ammonia for export.

Well that was the plan.

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That version of the project was rejected through the federal Environment Protection and Biodiversity (EPBC) Act in 2021 despite a 15GW version of the project, minus the town, getting approval a few years earlier.

In the years since, the company behind the project, has been working with the federal government to ensure the project is environmentally acceptable.

As part of those reconsiderations, however, a new town for the North West is well and truly dead.

The rejection of the hub was just one of several major renewable projects refused under Australia’s environment laws which have rankled state governments and the green energy sector in recent years.

And the debate over where you can build these kinds of facilities and renewable projects against how much biodiversity and habitat you destroy to do that is still alive.

Renewables versus biodiversity

In January this year the federal government’s decision to reject a port expansion for the renewable sector in Western Port Bay irked the Victorian government.

That rejection prompted Australia Institute climate and energy program’s Mark Ogge to say at the time that such rulings appeared to only be widely applied to renewable energy projects.

“Whereas huge fossil fuel projects which have terrible consequences for the environment rarely seem to be refused,” he said.

Taking a closer a look at applications through the EPBC Act shows refusals in general are rare regardless of the sector and their positive or negative contribution to climate change.

There have been more than 3,000 projects approved under the EPBC Act since its inception and only 31 refused.

Out of the energy projects rejected, two involved fossil fuels and five, including the North West project, were renewable.

The seven cases were knocked back due to where they were located rather than the nature of the project itself.

The two fossil fuel projects were rejected because of their respective impacts on a World Heritage Area and an internationally protected wetland, known as a Ramsar site.

The Central Queensland Coal Project was refused last year because of potential impacts to the Great Barrier Reef World Heritage Area about 10 kilometres from the proposed mine.

And the Galilee Coal Project was rejected in 2008 for the impact its proposed port and rail components would have on a Ramsar site and a historic military training area.

A variation of the Galilee project which sends the coal to an existing port, not impacting the Ramsar site, was then approved in 2013.

A majority of the renewable projects were also located in Ramsar sites, but there were other reasons why some of the projects were rejected.

The five renewable rejects

The five rejected renewable projects all varied widely in their scale, from powering a retirement village right up to covering a third of Australia’s energy needs.

The first was a proposal to build two small wind turbines on Lord Howe Island which would generate about 400 kilowatts of energy and replace the use of diesel to power homes and facilities for the 445 people on the island.

DCCEEW recommended the project go ahead but then federal Environment Minister Josh Frydenberg went against the advice and rejected the application because it would have an “intrusive visual impact” on the landscape of the national heritage-listed island.

Next up is Lotus Creek Wind Farm, 175 kilometres north west of Rockhampton in Queensland.

At first it was proposed to have 81 turbines with a combined capacity of 450 megawatts that would see the removal of 623.2 hectares of koala habitat and 340 hectares of greater glider habitat.

Sussan Ley, the then environment minister, refused the project in 2020 as she said it would have an unacceptable impact on threatened species.

But a revised version was accepted by current Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek in October, 2022.

Then there are the three projects in Ramsar sites.

A 201-unit retirement village in Queensland powered by a 10 megawatt solar array within the boundaries of the Great Sandy Strait Ramsar site was rejected after going through a full assessment by the DCCEEW.

A second version without the solar panels was also quickly knocked back for unacceptable impacts on the wetland and the developer is now trying to get EPBC approval for a third application.

Then came the Victorian government’s proposed energy terminal at Hastings Port in Western Port Bay.

Western Port Bay is one of the three most important sites for wading birds in Victoria and is also home to endemic marine life.

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The state government’s past development decisions have reflected the importance of the site.

In 2021 the Victorian government rejected a floating gas terminal at an existing jetty because of the amount of chlorinated water it would pump into the Ramsar site.

A separate review by the state government for where a new container port should go for Melbourne suggested Bay West at Geelong as a better option than Hastings Port.

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This was in part because of greater environmental and policy challenges in Western Port Bay.

Nonetheless, the then Andrews government decided in March last year that the Ramsar site would be the location of its renewable energy terminal to service offshore wind developments like the 2.2GW Star of the South project.

But 69 days after it was submitted to the federal government, DCCEEW found the Hasting expansion’s new wharf would create a low oxygen “dead zone” in Western Port Bay.

The department also noted the dredging of 92 hectares of the wetland to cater for ships would have irreversible effects on the Ramsar site’s ecological character.

Ms Plibersek said in her refusal decision there were no alternate sites that could be used to offset the impacts.

The group behind Star of the South, which is likely to be Australia’s first major offshore wind project to start construction, says it does not expect the timing of the project to change because of the refusal, with other port options in play to aid construction.

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The Victorian government is continuing to push for the Hastings expansion.

An avian mecca in the North West

Finally we come back to the fifth of the green energy rejects, the Australian Renewable Energy Hub.

Part of the proposal traverses Eighty Mile Beach, another Ramsar site.

It is one of Australia’s most important areas for migratory birds, a seemingly never-ending stretch of coast that makes for a perfect stopover to fuel up on mud-dwelling invertebrates.

The first version of the project would have laid electricity cables across the thin width of the beach and then along the Indian Ocean floor to Asian countries.

This was seen as perfectly fine under the EPBC Act as it would not mess with the all but untouched beach.

The second iteration had this whole new town, a desalination plant to keep them hydrated, ammonia production and associated export shipping infrastructure, including pipelines to an offshore unloading facility.

The pipelines would impede something known as the limits of acceptable change — ecological characteristics that make the Ramsar site important, which in this case was the requirement for unrestricted tides along the whole length of the beach.

Then there were concerns brine outflow from the desalination plant could create a hypoxic dead zone in the shallow bay, with catastrophic potential if it got to the intertidal area most utilised by the birds.

Another issue was what having a town of 8,000-plus people recreating at Eighty Mile Beach would also mean for its ecosystems.

DCCEEW found these impacts were totally unacceptable and the environment minister of the day, Ms Ley, agreed.

The second version of the hub was refused.

What does the pattern of rejections tell us?

It’s particularly tough trying to get approval to develop an internationally protected site, regardless of the industry.

But that’s not the case for more than a thousand projects, which include the fossil fuel and renewable sectors, that have cut down threatened species habitat.

An Australian Conservation Foundation investigation found about 200,000 hectares of threatened species habitat had been approved for destruction by the federal government between 2012 and 2021 across all industries.

The continued decline of Australian ecosystems is a concern which scientists and conservationists hope will be addressed in an ongoing revamp of environment laws.

Environmental lawyer and wetland expert Emma Carmody was the legal advisor to the Secretariat of the Ramsar Convention said Australia needed to address biodiversity loss and climate change simultaneously.

“This is particularly true in relation to wetlands, which are amongst the most threatened ecosystems on the planet, and which perform a variety of vital functions,” Dr Carmody said.

“This includes mitigating floods and storm surge events, improving water quality, providing nurseries for fish and habitat for a range of species, and storing carbon.”

Rejection not always the end

Refusal under the national environment law is not necessarily a deathblow for a project as it can be resubmitted with designs which better address potential biodiversity loss.

And in the case of bp and the Australian Renewable Energy Hub, there are a couple of options that would allow the proposal to still go ahead.

A bp spokesperson told the ABC it still had approval for its first 15 GW version of the project, which wasn’t considered a danger to Eighty Mile Beach.

But they said the company intended to lodge a revised plan for the hub this year that would take on board the environmental issues that sunk the last proposal for the 26GW project.

A town is no longer part of the design and a fly-in, fly-out workforce model is back on the agenda as bp tries to come up with a design that would not alter the Ramsar site.

“Our environment subject matter experts and technical teams are addressing the issues identified in previous project concepts,” the spokesperson said.

“bp has been engaging with the federal government in relation to the revised project design and looks forward to lodging this submission.”