Offshore wind towers will float on pontoons that are half the length of a football pitch, and each turn of a blade will be enough to recharge a Tesla.
That’s the scale of the build facing Emily Scivetti, who is behind several proposed offshore wind projects requiring $10 billion of capital each and a mountain of steel.
As chief operating officer at Australian company Oceanex, she is hunting for a workforce and materials for three proposed projects off the coast of NSW.
“I’m a steel city girl,” Ms Scivetti said, of her Wollongong origins, at a recent manufacturing summit in Canberra.
“The scale is on a new level.
“What do we need? We need to start now.”
Certainty of supplies and workers are front of mind as Oceanex prepares for three to five years of research, before taking a final investment decision.
Aiming for “first wind” in 2030/31, Oceanex is encouraging small businesses to get in touch and has set up a register of workshops employing locals to be part of the supply chain.
Oceanex has also been working with steel fabricators, as each project will need 750,000 tonnes of steel and there’s a five-year lead time to set up a workshop at the Port of Newcastle.
Indicative steel requirements include 1000 tonnes for each tower, up to 300 tonnes for each “anchor” for the mooring lines – with at least three anchors per turbine – and up to 5000 tonnes for each floating foundation.
Across the Hunter and Illawarra zones, Oceanex expects there will be up to 10 gigawatts of floating wind – enough to replace several Liddell or Eraring coal-fired power plants.
Construction needs to begin by 2028 to get first wind into the national electricity grid by the early 2030s.
If Oceanix was to build at a pace of one floating foundation a week, it would need up to three million tonnes of steel over 12 to 15 years and create 1000 full-time jobs in fabrication.
Meanwhile, Queensland is years ahead of some states with its plans for a “SuperGrid”, which Queensland Assistant Minister for Energy Lance McCallum says will create 100,000 new jobs, mostly in regional communities.
The coal and gas-rich state is the first in Australia to protect energy workers with a legislated job security guarantee and access to financial assistance as it switches to wind and solar, supported by big batteries and pumped hydro.
The state government was also the first in the world to appoint a hydrogen minister and is sending a clear message to investors to come to Queensland to use its abundant clean energy to make new fuels, fertilisers and electrolysers.
In Gladstone, even the roundabouts are getting a cut-through so that thousands of massive wind towers can be trucked from the port.
Publicly owned coal-fired power stations will become clean energy hubs by 2035 as Queensland intends to reduce energy system emissions by 96 per cent by 2040.
Clean energy and climate change are also central to international relationships, including key trading partners that want to cut emissions by using renewable hydrogen or ammonia, Mr McCallum said.
But there are headwinds, with Australia continuing its decline in the globally recognised Harvard Economic Complexity Index due to its reliance on mining and farming.
Australia is ranked 93rd out of 133 monitored countries, and the lowest of any OECD nation, after decades of decline in manufacturing activity.
The biggest customer for raw commodities is China, where Australian ingredients pour into factories and are sold back to consumers as electric cars, mobile phones, toys, clothes and clean energy equipment.
Fredrik Andren-Sandberg, an executive at clean energy giant Vestas, says there’s a “huge reliance” on China for solar panels and components for wind turbines.
“The further up you go in the value chain, there’s a heavy dominance of Chinese suppliers,” he said.
The embarrassing ranking in the widely respected benchmark means Australia is in the bottom half for projected growth in the capability to make complex items.
The nation comes in at 112th for economic growth out to 2031, at less than two per cent per year, according to the index.
And yet Australia could move up the global food – and energy – chain as it’s also a high-income country ranked ninth-richest on a per capita basis.
Victoria engineering firm Keppel Prince wants to manufacture wind towers for the state’s future offshore wind projects, rather than see parts continue to arrive at Portland from China, Vietnam and Indonesia.
Keppel boss Dan McKinna said it would be worthwhile for developers to pay a premium for local content, with government support.
At this point, Australia does not have a purpose-built wind tower manufacturing facility to match rivals with enormous capacity.
Local onshore wind tower manufacturers Keppel, and Tasmania’s Haywards, can make eight steel sections a week compared to 100 a week at large plants overseas.
Mr McKinna, who operates out of a converted particle board factory, says there’s no excuse for Australia not to be making wind towers at scale, particularly as global competition heats up.
Vestas has a 40 per cent market share in Australia for supplying wind farms and is in talks about using Australian steel because the Danish firm can no longer buy Russian steel or fabricate products in Ukraine to ship worldwide.
“Australia is like no other country on earth,” Mr Andren-Sandberg said, referring to the vast land mass and scope for clean energy to power manufacturing.
While Vestas prefers local production, it’s “very, very uncompetitive” to manufacture in Australia, he added.
It’s also uncompetitive to manufacture in the United States, but the Biden administration has done something about this by offering production credits for clean energy companies to set up shop, Mr Andren-Sandberg noted.
Unions boss Michele O’Neil said Australia should also consider public ownership and equity stakes in new supply chains so future wealth is shared.
“If we miss out on this opportunity to become a renewable manufacturing powerhouse, we’ll be leaving jobs and wealth on the table,” the ACTU president said.
“There shouldn’t be a single worker made redundant by the phase-out of fossil fuels,” she said.
The energy market operator says the surge in renewable energy generation expected by 2050 needs to be connected by more than 10,000km of new transmission lines and 25,000 transmission towers – each needing up to 60 tonnes of steel.
Geoff Crittenden, CEO of Weld Australia, said Australia does not have the sovereign manufacturing capability to make this a reality.
“Without a massive investment in local manufacturing, it will not be achievable,” he said.
Mr Crittenden, an industry veteran, warned of the consequences of inaction.
“Even the most obtuse of us now understand that climate change is coming at us much harder than we ever imagined,” he said.
“I had my honeymoon on the Greek island of Rhodes, a beautiful place. Now it’s a fireplace.”
AAP
