NSW is about to find out the scale of cumulative impacts in its renewable energy zones

New South Wales (NSW) agencies have quietly finished what is likely to be a major piece of work to win back community trust, but the tight-lipped way they’ve gone about it is raising questions. 

Cumulative impact studies for the Central-West Orana (CWO), South West and New England renewable energy zones (REZs) are either finished or will be by the end of the year, with two due to be shown to the public in the coming months.

The studies, each made up of five reports deep diving into how the convergence of massive construction projects will affect regional communities, will be very valuable but should have included communities in the process, says RE-Alliance national director Andrew Bray. 

The NSW government agencies worked with councils, but have so far left communities out of the 12-18 month process of building these studies.

“There’s been really valuable work going on behind the scenes,” Bray told Renew Economy. 

“Not taking the communities into their confidence along the way has meant they still have really valid questions about what’s going on. 

“The sooner those can be answered and communities can understand what the issues are and what measures are being taken to manage them, the better it will be.

“People want to know these issues are being looked after.”

Local governments across NSW’s REZs have been pleading for holistic cumulative impact studies for years, as they face the prospect of trying to manage big, but unknown, pressures on everything from housing to health services and road maintenance. 

In 2023, the Mid-Western Regional Council was so fed up it paid for its own cumulative impact study to find out what the-then 23 state significant projects in the area would require of it. 

It discovered if all of those projects, which weren’t just renewables, went ahead it would have to find room for a 40 per cent bigger population in just three years. 

When measured in housing, that meant supplying an extra 1,515 dwellings in 2026 from a rental market in 2023 that only had 74 vacant properties. 

This kind of unprecedented pressure on rural areas makes it critically urgent for councils and their communities to have the cumulative impacts of renewable developments assessed, acknowledged and addressed, says Local Government NSW president and Forbes Shire mayor Phyllis Miller.

“Communities are already feeling the impacts and many more local government areas are facing peak construction periods in 2026/27 which is when the greatest impacts will be felt,” she told Renew Economy. 

“The completion of cumulative impact studies for LGAs hosting renewable energy projects must be a high priority for the NSW government.”

Almost done

EnergyCo has finished the New England study, and the NSW Department of Planning, Housing and Infrastructure (DPHI) has finished its work on the CWO REZ and says the South West study will be ready by the end of the year. 

Each study contains five separate reports deep diving into workforce accommodation, water and wastewater security, training and skills, local supply chain, and waste and circular economy.

The studies “aim to provide a point-in-time analysis of the potential challenges and legacy opportunities”, an EnergyCo spokesperson told Renew Economy. 

The studies were a commitment by the NSW government last year after its REZ steering committee identified cumulative impacts as an issue at its October 2023 meeting. 

In a NSW inquiry into the impact of REZs on regions in January, both DPHI and EnergyCo promised their work would be finished and handed over to the steering committee during 2025. 

Taking control

Like the Mid-Western council, other local governments are beginning to take control to try to wrench back some advantage from the influx of business. 

Hay Shire Council head of economic development Alison McLean says they decided to set the agenda when developers came knocking on doors in the South-West REZ.

The council liaised with other local councils to work out what would be appropriate for the sparsely populated area and what impact the projects would have, so developers had an idea of what was possible from the outset.

In June, the Muswellbrooke Shire Council became the first in NSW to pass a policy stipulating how worker accommodation could and should be built in its patch of the Hunter-Central Coast REZ.

“We’re not copping substandard camps on the outskirts of town,” said shire mayor Jeff Drayton in a statement at the time. 

“We’re dealing with multiple major projects, almost weekly.”

Council staff estimate there are at least 24 projects in the Muswellbrook area which will need outside workers flown in between now and 2031. Temporary accommodation will need to be found for 1,250 people in the town between 2027 and 2029, when the cumulative impact of those projects is expected to peak.

It laid down rules such as banning in-house bars and gyms from temporary worker accommodation in order to integrate those employees into the local community. 

Cumulative opportunities 

Bray says it “certainly” would have been better if cumulative impact studies had been done earlier and individual projects could have been managed within that structure. 

But it’s a case of better late than never. 

“There’s absolutely work to be done from here to make sure projects coordinate better and can reduce the impacts of things like workforce accommodation,” he says.

“If different projects can use the same workforce accommodation, where units set up for one project can then be used by the next, that will be a better outcome that each project build their own facilities and take them down again.

“And then you start identifying opportunities for training the local workforce. For example, if you’re training apprentices for one project, they can move on to a second project and continue their apprenticeships.”

But it wasn’t just councils and communities asking for leadership on cumulative impacts. 

In April 2024, the joint venture ACEREZ which is leading the transmission build out in the CWO REZ told the steering committee there needed to be a coordinated approach to manage cumulative impacts.

Even for projects that have secured all state and federal planning approvals – and already tried to define their own cumulative impact as part of these applications – are keen to have the extra information in hand. 

Someva Renewables development director Tim Mead says the value of the study into the South West REZ for the company’s Pottinger Energy Park, one of only four projects to win access rights in that zone, is in planning out construction over the next 12 months. 

“This includes managing potable water supply and coordinating temporary workforce accommodation,” he told Renew Economy.

“There is strong merit in these studies, especially in supporting councils and providing certainty for local communities, and we’d encourage their development in other REZs in the future.”

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