Bennet Coad

farmer@ Barunah Plains

[Hamish Cumming @HamishCumming]

Ummm @LilyDAmbrosioMP & @JacintaAllanMP the last 48 hours doesnt look like your push to renewables is working very well. There is more than enough installed capacity of wind and solar to supposedly run the state, but its just not generating. Building more just doesnt make sense

[Hamish Cumming @HamishCumming]

No wonder Dundonnell wind farm is losing money. Two losts of bearing replacements on most turbines, pitch controller replacements, a couple of $4M narcells replaced and now blades going off and on for some reason. Its only 7 years old and runs at 23% CF.. 🍋
Photo taken 14km away

[Wimmera Mallee Environmental & Ag Protect Assoc @MalleeAg71414]

We are not backing down. Spanish company and VicGrid need to force access to more than 200 private properties. Please support and share the advocacy https://t.co/eR1w2zpRyE
https://t.co/RaUiRmtyn4

[Hamish Cumming @HamishCumming]

The @climatecouncil need to correct their misinformation. Dundonnell wfarm not good for #Brolga It has been a total disaster, losing 7 nesting pairs & 100 Brolga flocking site & the 4 wetlands they reinstated have never had a Brolga nest there,sp no chick. https://t.co/xmMhfVK9Qw

[Hamish Cumming @HamishCumming]

Con Job by @climatecouncil
Dundonnell wfarm has lost 7 nesting pairs. The 100 Brolga flocking site has gone The 4 wetlands that they have built have had no Brolga nesting at all. So the wfarm is a disaster for Brolga obliterating 7 chicks a year #auspol https://t.co/xmMhfVK9Qw

[Bennet Coad @BennyCoad]

@AlboMP

[Bennet Coad @BennyCoad]

@EnergyWrapAU

[Bennet Coad @BennyCoad]

@EnergyWrapAU @MalleeAg71414

[Bennet Coad @BennyCoad]

@SatPaper

[Hamish Cumming @HamishCumming]

East Australia very low wind today. Do you have a couple of spare trillion dollars to back this up, & then a couple more trillion to replace them in under 10 years. Just imagine the charge, discharge & line losses. How much biodiversity & endangered species have been lost so far

[Bennet Coad @BennyCoad]

@HamishCumming can hardly see it

[Hamish Cumming @HamishCumming]

https://t.co/aNlXu23wfX
Env Minister has granted permit for Robins Island turbines, Anyone with a heartbeat should be outraged @BBCBreaking @SBSNews @FoxNews @Channel7 @Channel10AU @SkyNewsBreak @wef @GretaThunberg @UN @WWF @BirdLife_News @birdemergency @StopTheseThings @auspol

[Bennet Coad @BennyCoad]

@TopherField

[Hamish Cumming @HamishCumming]

Every wind farm in Australia is not doing much tonight. Even if you had ten times as many wind farms & destroyed every last bit of farm land & native habitat to do it, the lights would still go out tonight without base load reliable power. And remember Aus is 0.5% of global GHG

[Aidan Morrison @FootnotesGuy]

This is the story of how a fund chaired by former Labor PM Julia Gillard acquired a wind farm project just six days before Labor Energy Minister Chris Bowen underwrote its future revenues with taxpayer money.

Today we've learned Julia's fund is trying to flip it. For a profit.

HMC Capital's 'Energy Transition Fund' rushed to acquire the Neoen Victoria portfolio. They hadn't even raised any money in their fund. They closed with almost a billion dollars worth of borrowed money and IOU's.

Less than a week later, Chris Bowen announced Kentbruck Wind Farm to be successful in the first round of the Capacity Investment Scheme. My rough calculations suggest they will receive something like a billion dollars from taxpayers (and maybe much more) over 15 years.

Sweet deal. A billion dollars of fancy financial monopoly money one week. A billion dollars of promised taxpayer dollars the next.

I want to emphasise that I have no evidence of anything illegal or improper taking place. Rather, I want to point out how odious and repugnant the official, proper, legal business of renewable energy has become.

Yesterday Chris Bowen announced he wanted to supersize the CIS subsidy scheme, yet again.

Today Ross Garnaut seemed to cheer this on, whilst pointing out "There are now virtually no new investment commitments for solar and wind generation that do not have CIS or other Government underwriting,"

What happened to a sense of propriety? Since when do we celebrate people rushing to put their snouts in the trough? Or rushing to fill the trough even higher?

Unlike the UK who publish a 'going rate' for technology subsidies, our renewables are subsidised through a secret tender process. Every project gets to ask for whatever revenue they want to proceed. @AEMO_Energy facilitates a secret beauty pageant, where they award points for things like indigenous participation or community engagement, alongside financial value.

And Chris Bowen makes the final call.

The bids remain secret. There's no cap to the pay-outs. Since AEMO is a private company, there is no scope for an FOI request, and AEMO aren't not subject to parliamentary oversight through Senate Estimates.

So no-one can ever prove an allegation that Bowen has bestowed special favour on a friend's project if that was what he did. But equally, he can never prove that he selected strictly according to merit. We are just expected to trust the black-box of Bowen's subsidies.

So I'm going to say out loud, with full voice, that I hope everyone can agree on:

If this is what the future of 'clean energy' looks like in Australia, it looks absolutely FILTHY.

Any firm that talks about ESG seriously should start taking the "G" a bit more seriously and steer clear of projects that thrust their snouts into Bowen's hopelessly opaque, bottomless trough of government funds.

Or at the very least, purge their boards and senior leadership of all the former Labor staffers, donors, and industry lobbyists who have had a hand in designing the trough, and filling it up.

The reality is that there are no natural profits to be made in generating renewable electricity in Australia.

Every dollar of profit in this industry is really a cheque signed by a politician, with Chris Bowen signing all the biggest cheques, worth untold billions, in the next three years.

It's all legal. It's all official. And it's absolutely obscene.
Mega-thread below.
(It'll come in stages)
1/

[Hamish Cumming @HamishCumming]

Kentbruck wind farm near the SA VIC boarder wants to decimate 2 Rasmsar wetlands, one National park and 11 breeding pairs of the endangered Southern #Brolga because they tell us the wind farms will save the planet. @VicGovAu is happy to destroy the environment for this fantasy

[Senator Matt Canavan @mattjcan]

What a great country we have 🇦🇺🇦🇺🇦🇺

[Hamish Cumming @HamishCumming]

@JEChalmers @cleannrgcouncil Kentbruck wfarm proposal near Nelson. Jammed between Ramsar wetlands & National Parks. Madness on a large scale @CorangamiteSC @ParksVictoria Glenelg Hopkins CMA & environmental groups all object, yet CEC, @kanethornton & @AustLabourParty all think its agood idea to break the law

[Hamish Cumming @HamishCumming]

@renew_economy There is supposed to be a decommissioning fund for the removal of these turbines, but Moyne Shire confirmed there is no money, There is no fun. Landholders may be left with the $750K per turbine cost to just remove the above ground component

[Hamish Cumming @HamishCumming]

🆘Please make a submission to protect #Brolga.
Say they must use post completion reports from 14 wfarms & all GPS records which will size buffers in excess of 5km, not the 900m they propose.
5km is needed to stop displacement, death and failure to breed
https://t.co/TxvAF63nS5