Generating windbags

Newcastle Herald
Tuesday 9/10/2007 Page: 8

By Joanne McCarthy: jmccarthy@theherald.com.au

FOUR weeks ago I was standing on a lookout above the Mundi Mundi plains west of Broken Hill. The photos show my hair blowing about because it's a windy place, and on the day we visited it was quite cool. It's the place you visit to get some sense of the vastness of outback Australia. You stand at the lookout, which is really nothing more than a dusty parking area on the side of the road, and look towards the horizon. And in between those two points there are flat, dry plains with little vegetation.

The historic mining town of Silverton is not far from the lookout. You drive west out of Broken Hill, past the road that takes you to the late Pro Hart's gallery, and near the caravan park where we stayed beside one of the most impressive cemeteries I've ever visited, and a flat road takes you through a relatively flat landscape until you reach Silverton, which is mainly flat except for a slightly sloping area topped by a couple of art galleries. Excuse the repetition, but you can't get away from the word flat when you talk about this part of the world.

It is no surprise they filmed the Mad Max movies in the Silverton area. The land is stark, the sky is brilliant and clear, and Silverton is the kind of eerie, strangely disjointed place that sticks in your mind. As eerie as Wilcannia, but for different reasons. It has a collection of historic buildings, which stand quite splendidly distant from each other like single stumps of teeth in an old bloke's grinning mouth. There's an old church, and a tiny old brick school with a sign hanging outside to note the fact that writer and social welfare campaigner Dame Mary Gilmore once taught there.

There's Silverton's famous pub, with its Mad Max car parked outside. On the day we visited you could hardly see the ear for the flock of Harley-Davidsons that had come to roost there, so we drove on. Silverton is an odd place, but the migratory habits of the grey nomads - travelling retirees who are pouring a lot of money into regional Australian towns these days - means it will stay on the map for a good while to come.

It was in the news yesterday for a $2 billion wind farm proposal on the edge of the Mundi Mundi plains a few kilometres north of Silverton. The Epuron Pty Ltd plan for 500 wind turbines under construction from late 2009 will be a significant shift towards renewable energy in Australia. The proposal is 10 tines larger than the next largest wind farm approved for NSW, and the company predicts it could generate enough energy for 400,000 houses. It could also reduce Australia's greenhouse gas emissions by 3 million tonnes of carbon dioxide a year.

All well and good, but the proposal has very neatly exposed one of the biggest hurdles facing green energy producers. Government.

David Wood is a University of Newcastle conjoint associate professor. His field of expertise is wind technology. The Epuron Pty Ltd proposal was wonderful news for the renewable energy industry, he said. But it is also a big gamble on the company's part because of uncertainty about real - as opposed to poll-driven political-speak-federal and state government support for coal alternatives by way of mandatory clean energy targets. It doesn't matter which major party we're talking about. Both Labor and Liberal have distinguished themselves by their mixed and lousy messages on this front. Look at the money trail and it doesn't take much to work out why.

The mining boom has allowed the Federal Government to amass billions of dollars. Coalmining is propping up the ailing NSW economy as well. "Clean coal" research is providing a handy blind for politicians who don't take seriously community support for alternative energy sources. It's easier to say there's money going into trying to clean up a dirty but relatively cheap energy source, than to provide reasonable regulatory frameworks in which alternatives can compete. Professor Wood has seen some of the brightest Australian ideas about renewable energy leave this country for development in America, China, Japan and Germany. "Government support for renewable energy at all levels has been negligible," Professor Wood said. The talk by politicians is largely hot air.