The owner and developer of Robbins Island, the Philippine-owned Acen Renewables was told in 2022 by the Tasmania EPA that it would have to shut down its planned 100 or so turbines for five months of each year to accommodate the movements of the Orange-bellied parrot.<\/p>\n
Acen said at the time that it meant the project could not proceed, and successfully overturned the ruling. But after successive legal battles and seven EPBC decision delays over the last few years, the shutdowns are now back on the table.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe Tasmanian Government, when it originally considered it, required a five-month shutdown of that wind farm which the proponent said would make it unviable,\u201d Watt said on Tuesday at a media conference in Brisbane, in response to a question from Renew Economy.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019ve chosen to not specify a particular amount of shutdown or even a requirement of a shutdown. What we\u2019ve said \u2026 is that the proponent will be required to put in place a bird and bat management plan to ensure that its operations don\u2019t endanger those species. <\/p>\n
\u201cIt is possible that as part of that plan that a short shutdown would be agreed to by the proponent, but we haven\u2019t sort of set any arbitrary timeframes for that. <\/p>\n
\u201cI would not expect that it would be in the order of the five months that the Tasmanian Government originally imposed and was overturned by a court, but all of those discussions are yet to occur.\u201d<\/p>\n
In an earlier press conference soon after the announcement, Watt said a shutdown \u2013 or temporary pause as he described it \u2013 could affect all or some of the project\u2019s planned wind turbines. <\/p>\n
\u201cThat\u2019s a plan that requires my approval as the Federal Minister, and I can assure you that we\u2019ll be taking any risk of impacts from these turbines on these endangered species very seriously,\u201d he said at the time.<\/p>\n
There was also confusion about the proposed construction times for the project. In his media release last week, Watt said that the project would not begin construction until 2031, after several years of studies. It has yet to secure planning approval for a 100 km transmission line.<\/p>\n
Acen, on the other hand, announced that it expected to begin generation in 2030. Asked about this on Tuesday, Watt said: \u201cYeah. So I would probably rely on the proponents\u2019 statements as to the commissioning date and the construction date.\u201d<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Giles Parkinson is founder and editor-in-chief of Renew Economy<\/a>, and founder and editor of its EV-focused sister site The Driven<\/a>. He is the co-host of the weekly Energy Insiders Podcast<\/a>. Giles has been a journalist for more than 40 years and is a former deputy editor of the Australian Financial Review. You can find him on LinkedIn and on Twitter.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The length of proposed shutdowns for one of Australia\u2019s most heavily contested wind farms has yet to be…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":135102,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[64,63,75,128],"class_list":["post-135101","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-environment","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-environment","tag-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/135101","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=135101"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/135101\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/135102"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=135101"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=135101"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=135101"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}