Australia’s only wind turbine tower maker to close shop, prompts Coalition to ignore its own history

Australia’s only remaining domestic wind turbine tower manufacturer, Keppel Prince, says it will mothball what remains of this part of its Victorian engineering business after fighting a losing battle to compete with cheaper Chinese imports.

In reports published in The Australian and The Standard (paywall) on Friday, Keppel Prince executive director Stephen Garner said the Portland-based company had this week informed the federal government it will mothball its wind tower operations in March next year, taking with it about a dozen jobs.

The article in The Australia says Keppel Prince “blasted the federal and Victorian governments” over long-running lack of certainty and failure to deal with heavily subsidised Asian steel imports – with the prime minister and federal energy minister Chris Bowen “singled out” for blame by Garner.

It’s not the first time Garner has taken a pot shot at federal ministers. He did it regularly during the nine years of Coalition government, and even at the Rudd government before that. But that didn’t stop the Murdoch media and the current Coalition opposition from arcing up all the same.

“They’ve got to look really bad that they are losing the only tower manufacturer accredited to build the things,” Garner told The Australian.

“The federal government continues to say, like Albanese says, we want to get back to manufacturing. Here we have a manufacturing facility already in place.

“It’s set up for renewable energy, which is what the government talks about every day of the week, and yet we’ve got to mothball it because we can’t compete with China because our government won’t do anything about it.”

This, of course, is manna from heaven for the Murdoch newspaper, which grasps the opportunity to describe the news as “a major embarrassment for the ­Albanese government” and its domestic renewables policy.

And certainly, the last gasp of domestic turbine manufacturing on the Albanese government’s watch, in the midst of its Future Made in Australia push, is not a good look.

Just last month, a report from The Australia Institute’s Centre for Future Work called for wind turbine towers to be included in the policy push for a Future Made in Australia, alongside solar PV and battery energy storage systems.

It said that given Australia’s “comparatively unsophisticated manufacturing base,” a mature low-medium technology activity like making turbine towers was well within our domestic capability. And returns could be significant.

According to cases simulated in the report, an established potential workforce of around 4,000 could produce around 818 towers every year with a cumulative value of $15 billion over the next 17 years. Report author Phil Toner said about 2.6 million tonnes of CO2 emissions would also be avoided due to reduced shipping.

But sheeting the blame for Keppel Prince’s troubles entirely to Labor is to ignore history, as is wheeling out the Liberal member for Wannon, Dan Tehan, to deliver a cheap shot at renewables on behalf of the nuclear-pushing federal Coalition.

It was, after all, Tehan who was publicly shamed for ignoring the company’s plight just two years ago when he was in government.

“Their (Labor’s ) renewables only policy has been such a success it has closed our last remaining wind tower manufacturer,” Tehan told The Australian on Friday. “It would actually be funny, if workers weren’t losing their jobs because of such incompetence.”

In fact, the history of Keppel Prince’s struggle to compete on wind turbine tower manufacturing goes back more than 15 years, with the “incompetence” spread across the years and various governments of all persuasions.

As far back as April 2009 you can find reports of Garner reporting 100 jobs losses and warning of more to come – in this case in the wait for the Rudd Labor government to set a new national renewable energy target (of more than 2 per cent!), which it did the following August.

In October 2014, Renew Economy reported that Keppel Prince had mothballed most of its Portland wind tower operations and laid off 100 staff following the decision by the Abbott government to try to cut Labor’s 20 per cent by 2030 renewable energy target by more than half.

At that time, the company issued a press release saying that continued uncertainty over the future of the RET meant losses at its manufacturing operations would continue. The fabrication lines would be mothballed and 100 full time employees would be cut, it said.

In March 2022 – after years of Coalition rule federally, but having had some support via local content rules of Victorian Labor’s renewable energy targets – another warning was issued.

This time, workers for Keppel Prince and representatives from the Australian Manufacturing Workers Union (AMWU) protested the arrival in Portland of imported wind towers that they said had cost 40 workers their jobs and left another 100 workers facing uncertainty. 

An AMWU press release said the union had taken workers from Keppel Prince to Canberra to “fight for their jobs and to demand local steel and local manufacturing jobs were prioritised.”  

“We’re tired of [then prime minister Scott] Morrison and his politicians sending our work offshore to the cheapest bidder. We can make wind towers here, on time, on budget and of better quality,” AMWU national secretary Steve Murphy said at the time. 

“Local Member of Parliament Dan Tehan knew about this and refused to lift a finger – the imported towers his government signed off on last year have been found with multiple cracks and have had to be recalled. 
 
“This government has stopped listening to the regional workers who make this country thrive – we need to change the government,” Murphy said in 2022. 
 
“These Keppel Prince workers are doing the jobs that we want and need to have in regional Australia. These skilled manufacturing workers are creating a greener future for Australia, but the government has ignored them and now they’re forced to protest the arrival of these imported wind towers into Portland.
 
“Without proper government support, growth industries like the renewable energy manufacturing industry in Australia are at risk. If this industry fails it will take hundreds of high-skill, high-wage jobs in regional Australia with it.” 

All this history repeating doesn’t let anyone off the hook, politically, but rather offers some important perspective on the deeply embedded challenges of building relatively new supply chains into a sustainable success story – and on the need for focused and stable policies that won’t be changed with every change of government.