Colin Boyce (Flynn, Liberal National Party) Share this | Hansard source

I'm very happy to second the motion put forward by the member for Nicholls with respect to the Requiring Energy Infrastructure Providers to Obtain Rehabilitation Bonds Bill 2024 and how it will make provisions for the rehabilitation, the decommissioning and the disposal of renewable energy projects Australia-wide. There are some big questions over the future of renewable energy: who is going to rehabilitate the land, who is going to dispose of the materials and who is going to make sure that those moneys are available at some point in time in the future? The big question is: what will it all cost? I would suggest that it will be an enormous amount of money.

I will use some figures that we know of in the construction of these projects as an example. Lotus Creek Wind Farm up in central Queensland is a proposed wind turbine farm. It is a $1.3 billion project. It is 46 turbines; 46 into $1.3 billion is approximately $28 million per turbine. These companies are fragmenting the last big stands of remnant vegetation up and down the east coast of the Great Dividing Range in Queensland. So the questions are: what will it cost to dispose of that, to rehabilitate it and to re-establish that? I would suggest that it will amount to billions, and there is absolutely no guarantee that the companies that are putting forward these projects will even exist in 20 to 25 years time.

This bill goes some way to addressing those issues. We know that there are some 21,000 wind turbine projects that are proposed and are under some form of scrutiny from both state and federal governments as we speak. If you take a nominal figure, given the $1.3 billion Lotus Creek project in Queensland, and just use a nominal figure of $20 million per turbine, we're talking in the vicinity of half a trillion dollars to establish wind turbines alone. So the big question is: what will it take to pull them all down, dispose of them and rehabilitate the land? The numbers are enormous. In Queensland, we know that all of these projects, wind and solar and so forth, are attached to the land tenure of the people that control the land. So the question again is: will these people that have accepted responsibility and accepted payment for these things be held to account?

These are questions that have yet to be reasonably answered. This bill proposed by the member for Nicholls goes some way to addressing those issues into the future, and I fully support the bill.

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