This is a recent example: Huge 10-hour battery attracts big wad of long distance objections, joins federal green queue (emphasis mine):
The NSW planning application is for 10-hours of storage, possibly to build in added redundancy, or more flexibility, and it turns out that some people who live in Queensland, Tasmania, Victoria and hundreds of kilometres away in other parts of NSW are annoyed.
The project attracted 74 objections, of which just one was truly local, a man who lives 650m down the road from the battery and solar projects developments and was worried about road use, and noise and air quality.
As is now common, most of the objections to the project were anonymous and, apart from the local man’s worries, repeated the same stale, and occasionally unhinged comments that are regularly copy-pasted into the submissions process.
These include concerns about foreign ownership, that “ruin-abulls” (sic) create a fire risk that could release toxic chemicals, and of Chinese Communist Party control of the energy sector.
A group called Save Our Surroundings Redbank Plains, a suburb outside Brisbane, objected on the grounds that it is an “evil, poisonous and treacherous plan that’s designed to rip off Australian people, contaminate our land/water /biodiversity/the public and enable our greatest enemy to control and harm us.”
In NSW, any project that gets more than 50 objections has to be sent to another independent planning committee, even if the objections are conspiracy theory BS from someone 500km away.
Why are cookers from the other side of the country allowed to stall projects like this? NIMBYism is one thing but these drongos are mostly from other states entirely.
Some older examples:
- 815 MW Bullawah wind farm and 718 MWh battery - Out of 84 submissions, 0 within 5km, 39 were from over 100km away including 5 from Queensland and 5 from Victoria.
- Dinawan 1.2 GW wind farm - 89 submissions, 7 within 5km, 64 from more than 100km away.
- Steel River Battery Energy Storage System - 3 submissions in support from people within 50 km of the project, 61 submissions objecting, all further than 50 km from the project, inlcuing 17 from Victoria and 6 from Queensland and 1 from Tasmania..
- Hume North battery - 72 objections, including nine from special interests groups, with 63 of these from people or groups located 100 kms or more away, or interstate. More than half objected to the very idea of replacing fossil fuels with renewables and storage.
- Deniliquin 480 MWh battery - zero objections within 50km, 66 from more than 50 kms away, and 26 from interstate.
That last one goes into some details about the content of the objections too:
Several objectors think the battery is actually a wind farm, and others think it is a solar project.
One is concerned about its impact on the catchment of the Keiwa River, which is 250 kms away, located in another state and on the other side of the Murray River. Maybe they had been encouraged to complain about another project, and forgot to change it for this one.
“Soon, we’ll all be in the dark thanks to delusional Global Boiling cultists!” said one.
Many years ago I worked with some people in the telco space who worked on mobile phone towers. One poor guy kept repairing a tower that was repeatedly vandalised by Anti-5G “activists”. The tower wasn’t even set up for 5G. To convince anyone who would listen that the 5G was dangerous they were poisoning random trees around the tower. He got spat on by a looney that hissed at him about “Killing babies”.
There are just nutters out there who want to drag the world backwards to some halcyon day of yore (that never existed) and who refuse to let science, facts, or actual common sense (not the perverted pseudo masterbatory fantasy they try to pass off as common sense) get in the way of the narrative they have concocted, or been fed by grifters.
The last one I had the misfortune of discussing renewables with brought up the Spotlight piece on renewables. I went away and researched it, caught up with him a week later and started giving him some facts around the piece, he had genuinely forgotted he brought it up and then responded to my fact checks with “Oh I don’t care about any of that, just thought the wind turbines look ugly and the construction site looks pretty rough.” He also told me Howard was easily the best PM Australia has ever had and that Labor hasn’t delivered a single budget surplus only the Liberals are able to do that. Suffice to say I just refuse to talk politics with someone that terminally uninformed and uninterested.