The wind never really stops on Peter Watts’ hill. On his grazing property, 90km north-west of Bendigo, it sweeps in across the plains and picks up strength as it climbs. “I can go up there any time of the day,” Watts says. “It might be completely still down here but it’s always windy up there.”
For five generations, the hill was just part of the landscape. Then, in 2002, scientists told him it was the “perfect spot” for a windfarm. Developers came knocking a decade later, proposing to build six turbines on the hill, each one 95 metres high
After a stretch of drought, the offer of steady income was appealing. Watts signed a 33-year lease, but he says it wasn’t the money that sealed it.
“They were such a good group of people to deal with,” he says. “Nothing was ever a problem. If something came up, they’d come sit down with you and work through it.”
When the question arose about how to connect to existing Powercor lines, a small substation was built. When access became an issue, a road was built on the edge of Watts’ property. Even neighbours who were, as Watts puts it, “grizzly” about the view of turbines on the hill were brought into the fold – they were offered about $2,500 a year for the life of the project, and there was $25,000 in annual community grants.
“They did the work, they got the backing of the community, and that’s what helped get it over the line,” he says.
Watts’ windfarm was among the first in the region. As Victoria pushes towards a target of 95% renewable energy by 2035 and prepares for the closure of major coal-fired power plants, dozens of similar projects are spreading across the state’s west. Now, renewable energy is shaping as a defining issue in the November state election.
Complaints about consultation
The Victorian government, which set its renewable energy target in 2022, is facing what it describes as planning roadblocks. More than one projects has ended up at the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal since 2015, causing significant delays. The Victorian premier, Jacinta Allan, last year said about $90bn of investment was sitting in the pipeline.
To speed things up, the government fast-tracked approvals, limited third party appeals and created a new state body called VicGrid to oversee planning across six renewable energy zones. Controversially, it also passed laws to allow VicGrid and its contractors access to private land – without a landholder’s consent.
Andrew Peverill, who owns a farm in Glenloth in north west Victoria, says it felt like the government was “ploughing through” its plans without listening to regional communities.
His farm sits in the path of VNI West, a proposed 240km transmission line linking Victoria to New South Wales. About 2.3km of the line will cut across his land, which is used for broad acre cropping and running merino sheep.
“There’s a lot of land in Australia it could go on that it wouldn’t affect much,” he says. “But it’s really good ground [here] and the further south you go, the better it gets.”
Peverill supports renewable energy – like most farmers he has solar panels on his roof – but not this development.
“It’s the way it’s being done,” Peverill says.
VNI will eventually connect into the Western Renewables Link, another major transmission project managed by AusNet, which links Bulgana in western Victoria to Sydenham in Melbourne’s north-west. Opposition to the project has been on display for five years near Daylesford in central Victoria, where a farmer has sprayed “piss off AusNet” onto a hillside.
Labor insiders privately concede the projects could cost it the seat of Ripon in western Victoria, which takes in most of the path of the Western Renewables Link. The seat is held on a margin of less than 3%. Other regional seats on the two routes have traditionally been Nationals’ heartland but One Nation is gaining ground. Barnaby Joyce, the former Nationals MP who defected to One Nation in December, visited Horsham in February and he criticised VicGrid’s expanded powers.
The backlash to renewable energy developments in regional Victoria – particularly in the state’s west – is strong. The outgoing Victorian Farmers Federation president, Brett Hosking, who lives in the line of VNI, says community engagement has been “woeful”. Some volunteer fire brigades say they won’t attend fires at properties hosting renewable infrastructure, while farmers have protested outside parliament and heckled Allan at an address in Ballarat in 2025. Anger about a new emergency services levy has added fuel to the fire, with the government in December forced to freeze the rate hike for farmers for two years because of the backlash.
Peverill was among a group of farmers who last year blocked VicGrid from entering their properties to carry out ecological surveys. More farmers are blocking surveys this year.
In a statement, VicGrid said the surveys were part of preparing an environmental effects statement, and that more than 170 landholders had allowed it to access their land since 2023, receiving payments of between $10,000 and $50,000. It has also issued 26 notices of proposed entry for properties between Stawell and Murrabit where access was refused – a property owner who bars entry could attract fines of up to $800.
For Pervill key questions about VNI west remain unanswered: how the line will affect GPS-guided farm machinery; why government payments are capped at 25 years when towers will “be here forever”; and the potential fire risk and affects on waterways. He also argues there’s been little effort to follow property boundaries instead of cutting through the middle of farms.
VicGrid says there are 6,500kms of transmission across Victoria, most of it on farms that remain productive, and says there are no record of any turbine starting a bushfire in the state.
But even Watts is critical of VNI, describing it as the “opposite” of everything that made his windfarm experience positive.
“Families that have been friends for years and years have gotten to the stage where they can’t even look at each other,” he says. “That’s just not right.”
Recent polling commissioned by Renew Australia for All found 66% of those surveyed in the western Victoria renewable energy zone supported the transition, while 13% opposed. Many farmers are in the latter camp.
One group, Farmers Fightback, has characterised the transition as a plan to “make foreign billionaires much wealthier”, noting VNI will be built and operated by a Spanish multinational. The group accused VicGrid of “the most egregious overreach” in Victoria’s history and its attempts to access land as a “coordinated campaign of intimidation”.
Only a few, including Tragowel farmer Craig McIntosh, have broken ranks to publicly support the project.
Wayne Weaire is a board member at VicGrid, and says he applied to join after his property at Bolwarrah was caught up in a period of limbo over the Western Renewables Link development envelope.
“They said it would be somewhere between my property and 20km south,” he says. “I’d been around government long enough to know what was coming – so we sold. In the end, I was right.
“Coming out of that experience, I have always thought that it could have been done better.”
Weaire is urging landholders to allow VicGrid on to their properties to carry out surveys, because he says it’s their opportunity to have their say.
“The pressure is on to make sure there is energy there when the last coal power station is shut down,” he says. “And we’ve got so much to do.”
The Coalition’s Shadow energy spokesperson, David Davis, says the Coalition will repeal the VicGrid bill if it is elected in November, describing its “draconian powers” as a “massive overreach”.
He is also critical of the cost overruns on VNI West, but will not say if the Coalition will continue with the project or the Western Renewables Link if it wins government.
The Allan government says it’s pushing ahead. It says since 2024, 25 renewable energy projects have been fast-tracked, with decisions made in an average of four months after an application is submitted to the government.
“Only Labor will build the critical renewable energy infrastructure, including VNI West, needed to deliver cheap power and keep the lights on,” a spokesperson told Guardian Australia.
New income streams
The largest renewable development in the state is the Golden Plains windfarm, which will have 215 turbines across about 16,700 hectares. Stage one, with 123 turbines already built, generates about 4.5% of Victoria’s energy supply, or roughly 2.6 gigawatts a year.
It’s overseen by Andrew Riggs, managing partner at TagEnergy, and leases land from 43 landowners around Rokewood, where grazing and cropping continue beneath the turbines.
Host landholders were “super excited” about the guaranteed income stream, Riggs says, “but sometimes the neighbours aren’t happy”.
That tension has forced a rethink across the industry. Riggs says that over the past five years, landholder payments have risen more slowly, with money instead directed to neighbouring properties to “spread the benefits wider”.
About 200 households within 3km of stage one of the windfarm receive electricity bill credits and annual payments based on proximity and impact. Within 5km, neighbours were offered landscaping support to screen views of turbines or one-off payments do it themselves. Community grants have also funded projects in Rokewood.
Mayor of Golden Plains Shire, Own Sharkey, says the approach has helped avoid division.
“That’s not to say there wasn’t opposition – there were still a few people who didn’t want it,” Sharkey says. “But broadly there was support. This was a low socioeconomic community, where the farmers were absolutely struggling. So I think it was really embraced by community for those reasons.”
That helped head off the “tinfoil hats” and “uneducated debate,” he says. But that’s since shifted: the region is now in the Central Highlands renewable energy zone. One or two projects can be debated on their own merits, but as the number of projects grow the capacity for careful consultation and nuanced debate wanes.
“Ninety per cent of people aren’t anti renewables,” Sharkey says. “They want a say. They want input.”
