Fortescue faces new scrap over fence line for its massive Bonney Downs wind project

A legal scrap over the boundaries of Fortescue’s enormous Bonney Downs wind farm proposal has risen from the dead, creating a possible roadblock in front of the 2 gigawatt (GW) project.

Alinta Energy has had a minor win in its now-two year legal battle over whether Pilbara Energy, the iron ore giant’s subsidiary, should be allowed to build the mammoth wind project, 

The project is proposed for a site 9 km south-west of the town of Nullagine in Western Australia’s Pilbara region, near the company’s Christmas Creek iron ore mine site, and is a key part of Fortescue’s plan to reach “real zero” by 2030.

But crucially for Alinta and more so the new owner of its Pilbara assets, APA Group, the project is partly on top of what they say will become the Chichester Renewable Energy Hub – a proposal that rates a mention in an APA investor presentation in 2024 but few other places outside court documents yet.

The Bonney Downs lease area. Image: Pilbara Energy

Last week, the Supreme Court of Western Australia agreed to set aside a decision in the Warden’s Court last year refusing a deadline extension to lodge objections against some of the Bonney Downs licences, and sent the extension application back to a lower court.

While Alinta did not wish to comment as it no longer owns the Pilbara assets, APA was pleased with the result.

“We welcome the decision from the Supreme Court of Western Australia. Our project remains on track, and we are in the advanced stages of securing land tenure,” a spokesperson told Renew Economy.

Alinta is maintaining the legal challenge as it started the whole process in 2023, but it’s APA who now owns the problem: the Bonney Downs project and its 200 turbines not only sits on top of its own leases, but could reduce the wind resource available to its own wind proposal.

Adding salt to the wound is the fact that Alinta had been collecting licences to build that hub for years and sold them as a package to APA Group in 2023 for

.8 billion, all before Fortescue started putting together the Bonney Downs project. 

Fortescue starting hoovering up land in October 2023, some of which overlapped with those for the Chichester project and gave APA until December to lodge an objection.

Alinta and APA got their objections to the overlapping licences in on time but missed the deadline to do the same for other Bonney Downs licences. They objected in April but had their request for an extension rejected. 

APA group counsel Liam Dunstan told the Warden’s Court he didn’t think APA could lodge an objection, given Alinta was the licence applicant, and they only found evidence of the wake effect after the deadline had passed.

In February last year, Warden Thomas McPhee rejected APA’s claims and closed what he called a “tortuous path” of 10 months of litigation that should have been wrapped up in weeks.

However, on his decision last week, Supreme Court Justice Alain Musikanth reopened the labyrinth.

He agreed the warden “misapprehended his statutory duty by effectively concluding that Alinta was required not only to adduce evidence in support of its proposed objection but also to do so to a ‘prima facie level.”

He also said the warden should have considered an affidavit from former Alinta employee David Campbell about the wake effect, where turbines could slow wind speeds for others in close proximity.   

The APA project is not the only fenceline that Bonney Downs is crossing: it also takes in some of the Roy Hill pastoral lease, held by avowed renewables opponent, and iron ore magnate, Gina Rinehart.

However, the planning document notes that all the proposed turbines will be located on the Bonney Downs lease, and the small section affecting Roy Hill appears to be related to transmission infrastructure.

Fortescue’s real zero plans will require nearly 3 GW of wind and solar, battery storage, and the electrification of their mining operations and transport.