Tom Gunthorpe is a second generation farmer and one of the many hosts of one of the country’s newest wind farms, the 312 megawatt Bango facility south of Yass.
And his experience – and that of the landowner group that was created by the local farming community – is an important one given some of the pushback and the deliberate misinformation that is engulfing wind and even solar and battery projects around the country.
One of the biggest arguments currently put against wind farms, and the farmers that host the turbines, is that they will be left holding the bill of decommissioning those turbines in a few decades time, and will also be left holding the tab if any damage or repairs are needed.
Gunthorpe says that is not the experience of the group of farmer hosts that he is involved with. But that may be at least partly because of the way they went about negotiating with the developers when first approached more than a decade ago.
“So one thing that we did, we put a farmer group together, we decided very early in the piece that we would negotiate as one and not have this divide and conquer thing going on,” he told an audience of more than 400 people at the National Renewables in Agriculture conference in Orange earlier this month.
