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Spend a little time on social media, and you could be forgiven for thinking renewable energy is tearing regional communities apart. In Victoria, stand-offs over the VNI West transmission project and protests about offshore wind farms along Gippsland’s Bass Coast have exposed real tensions in affected communities.
Australia’s energy transition is often framed around national targets, metropolitan policy debates and the promise of cheaper, cleaner power. But its most immediate impacts are being felt in regional communities.
As coal and gas give way to renewable generation, regional communities are being asked to host the wind and solar farms, storage projects and transmission lines needed to connect new energy to the grid. The transition brings real opportunities: investment, jobs, training, and long-term economic renewal, particularly for communities affected by coal closures. But it also raises difficult questions about land use, landscape change, local identity, housing and workforce pressures, and who bears the costs of change.
For many metropolitan households, the transition may be experienced mainly through power bills, reliability and climate policy. For regional communities, it is also experienced physically and socially through infrastructure on farms, near towns and across familiar landscapes.
CSIRO research points to broad support or at least tolerance for renewable energy infrastructure, with more than 80 per cent of Australians willing to tolerate living within 10 kilometres of it, and attitudes broadly consistent across capital cities, regional cities and towns. But the same research shows that people living out of town, often closest to proposed projects, are more likely to hold negative views. Transmission lines attract greater concern than renewable generation itself. Those concerns are sharpened by the scale of the task: the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) has identified thousands of kilometres of new or upgraded transmission needed as the grid changes, while the independent Community Engagement Review found that 92 per cent of respondents were dissatisfied with the level of engagement from renewable energy infrastructure project developers.
This Folio Conversation with Bronya Lipski – a planning and environment law and policy specialist - will explore how Australia can make the transition fair, practical and trusted by the communities most affected by it.
This event is part of a collection of events and curated content on the theme “Energy Shift”, which examines the impacts of Australia’s energy transition already underway.
Conversation Leader - Bronya Lipski
Bronya is from the Latrobe Valley, a community on the front line of the renewable energy transition and is a planning and environment law and policy specialist. She has 15 years of experience working across public interest and industry planning and environment matters, with a special interest in the renewable energy transition.
Her work includes policy development and law reform in nearly every Australian jurisdiction to find practical solutions to the tensions inherent in three entwined and wicked problems: energy transition, climate change, and biodiversity decline. Her previous roles include public interest law reform, litigation, policy and advocacy, and she played a leading role in planning and environmental policy and guidance for renewable energy development as the Clean Energy Council's General Manager Planning and Environment.In her spare time, she is a strategic advisor on the establishment of the Biodiversity and Renewables Institute of Australia and Chair of the Biodiversity Working Group at the National Environmental Law Association.
Event Details
We will be serving drinks and nibbles from 6pm onwards, with the conversation starting at 6:30pm.
