Why is the Commonwealth holding back offshore wind in Australia?

If you’re of a certain vintage, you’ll know about the British Empire. In an age of seafaring and exploration, countries like England, France, Spain, Portugal and Holland colonised others, where the native language was superseded by another.

Travel to Brazil and you’ll hear Portuguese, head to the Ivory Coast and sample French, fly to Australia or Canada and witness English (along with French in Quebec, of course).

Empires have become partly controversial with slavery being a feature of many – where we saw, only recently, toppling of statues as part of the BLM movement. We don’t want to focus on politics, nationalism and history though in this, the latest post from HSEQ-360, but we are looking, as the title tells you, at the offshore wind industry in Australia.

History and its territorial divisions are causing issues in the industry’s development there.

And here’s why.

Australia, unlike many countries, has two levels of government – state and federal. But a third hurdle is added to the mix with the fact it has a Commonwealth Government.

We all know, too, that the greater the levels of bureaucracy, the longer changes take to implement. 

There’s a conflict, you see (pun intended) out at sea.

The majority of Australian wind turbines are being installed in Commonwealth water, but, as we’ve seen closer to home here in Norfolk, the transmission infrastructure is governed by the state. Regulation is a bit of a maze to navigate here. 

There’s conflict too in what wind turbine developers see in the way parallel industries have been treated. Oil and gas, for example, has easier legislation to navigate than that of offshore wind. 

The problem is clearly that offshore wind is a relatively young industry in Australia and the move to create an Offshore Electricity Infrastructure Act is a mammoth one. 

Anthony Lamb, from MGIG, is candid about the potential obstacles:

“We have found these issues in many of the jurisdictions we operate in, where kind of obscure little rules that weren’t written with with offshore wind in mind have threatened multi-billion dollar projects,” Lamb said.

“And the solution has always been… a collaborative effort between developers, government – at a national and local level – and other interested parties to get together and work through those issues.

“Because generally there’s a workable solution. It just takes discussion and cooperation. So we envisage there’ll be a lot of that.”

The main problem stems from having local legislation in federal states, that complicates development, as well as the granting of licenses.

When one thinks of the land mass of Australia and its vast coastline, it’s surprising that there’s currently no wind farms there, though 20 are in project planning stage, expected to produce a combined total of 23GW. This starkly contrasts with the UK, where there are many more, including four in the Thames Estuary. 

But, if planning obstacles are overcome, three new projects are imminent – one bottom-fixed and two floating wind farms.  The floating wind technology is planned to be installed off the coast of New South Wales and bottom-fixed turbines are planned for the waters of offshore Victoria.

HSEQ-360 watch Australia with interest.