Hotly contested plans to build a $1 billion-plus, 900MW wind farm on Robbins Island off north-west Tasmania have been given a boost after a Supreme Court bid to overturn state environment approvals was rejected on Thursday.
The Supreme Court decision marks the latest twist in the Acen Australia project’s fraught development history, and stems from the 2022 decision by Tasmania’s Environment Protection Authority to approve the wind farm – on the condition its 100 turbines were shut down for five months every year when the endangered orange bellied parrot migrates.
That decision was overturned after developer Acen Australia successfully appealed to the Tasmanian Civil Administrative Tribunal, only for TasCAT’s decision to be appealed in the Supreme Court by the EPA.
A counter appeal against the TasCAT decision was also lodged with the Supreme Court by the community-based Circular Head Coastal Awareness Network.
The Network had four arguments against TASCAT, including that it erred by not investigating alternatives to a 509m wharf, which Acen says is critical to being able to deliver 86m long blades. Another point of contention was that community benefits would only come if the electricity is delivered from the island so a transmission line permit application needed to be part of the decision making process.
Acting Justice Shane Marshall on Thursday dismissed the action bought by the Circular Head Coastal Awareness Network, describing the transmission argument as “misconceived.” He said that if all the public benefits of all big developments were weighed against the fact they needed other approvals, it would be “virtually impossible” for any to be built.
“The finding that the project would provide a ‘community benefit’ of relevant significance, and the finding that the project would ‘provide an essential utility of significance for Tasmania’ were accurate findings. They merely restate common sense. Extra renewable resources into the power grid would result from a functioning wind farm,” Marshall said in his judgement.
“It is not uncommon for major infrastructure projects to require more than one approval to be granted and to occur in order for the benefits of the project to be realised.”
Outside the court, Acen Australia managing director David Pollington said the decision was an important win for the wind farm.
“It has been a very long time,” he told ABC News.
“We’ve done extensive work in developing and taking this forward … the shutdown provision, we comprehensively showed at the Tasmanian Civil and Administrative Tribunal, was not valid.”
On top of the legal challenges, the potentially huge wind farm has faced strident opposition from community and green groups since it was first proposed for development.
Critics, including the Bob Brown Foundation, say Robbins Island is the wrong place to build a wind farm due to its role as a habitat for the critically endangered orange bellied parrot and other wildlife, including wedge-tailed eagles and Tasmanian devils.
Pollington said on Thursday that he believes there is also strong community support for the wind farm.
“There is a small minority that are vocal, but the vast majority of people that we meet in our community engagement are very supportive of the project,” he told ABC.
On the development front, the wind farm still faces what likely looms as its biggest hurdle, yet – environmental assessment under the federal Environment Protection Biodiversity Conservation (EPBC) Act.
The Robbins Island project has been the EPBC queue since 2017, when it was first determined as a controlled action by then Coalition energy and environment minister Josh Frydenberg.
Since then, changes to the project proposal have required reassessment by current environment minister Tanya Plibersek – but a fresh decision on whether or not the project is a controlled action has been delayed a total of four times since 2022.
The latest extension pushed out the deadline for a decision on whether it needs full assessment under the EPBC Act, to March 07 – next week – presumably to wait for the legal saga to play out.
Putting aside the project’s environmental impacts, critics of Robbins Island wind farm also argue that a project of that size is redundant in the majority hydro-powered state – and question whether it is economically viable, given the grid and other infrastructure needed to support it.
“It’s dependent on Marinus Link taking the energy to the mainland …so it’s not to meet Tasmanian demand. It is mega-development that is speculative in the national energy market,” former Greens leader Christine Milne and member of the Bob Brown Foundation told RenewEconomy last year.
“So the question becomes, why would you even consider permitting that, when it’s going to have such an adverse impact on the ecosystem as a whole and on so many endangered species?
“The only argument they have for destroying biodiversity is …’we can use the renewable energy.’ The question is, do we need that renewable energy from that particular site?
“And is it economically viable to produce it from there or is there a feasible alternative? And in the case of Robbins Island, of course there are feasible alternatives.”
