By RE-Alliance, July 2021.
In recent years, the Australian renewable energy industry, with encouragement from non-government organisations like RE-Alliance, have increasingly incorporated best practice community engagement and community benefit sharing into renewable energy projects such as wind and solar farms.
Australian State and Territory Governments are committing to developing Renewable Energy Zones (REZs), as planned in the Australian Energy Market Operator’s (AEMO’s) 2020 Integrated System Plan (ISP) and other jurisdictional REZ initiatives in Victoria, NSW and Queensland. Not only will there be significant numbers of new solar farms, wind farms, battery developments and pumped hydro storage plants, there will be a commensurate roll out of new transmission infrastructure to transfer the electricity from regional locations where it is generated to population and business centres, where it is used.
Local rural communities affected by new transmission infrastructure, and other stakeholders, deserve to be able to participate in how these projects are deployed and derive benefits from this new infrastructure and not just bear its costs and localised impacts. These communities have argued that consideration of social and environmental impacts of new transmission projects needs to be more robust and take place earlier in the planning process.
Recent changes to the National Electricity Rules will require public consultation around new REZ transmission lines as well as preparatory activities such as preliminary assessment of environmental and planning approvals. This high-level assessment will apply to specified REZs in future ISPs.
This REZ planning stage would occur prior to the Regulatory Investment Test for Transmission (RIT-T) which assesses options and economic net benefits to electricity consumers in more detail.
