Former Glenelg Shire Mayor Geoff White.

So just who are the faces behind Australia’s looming renewable energy revolution? Greenpeace’s Rebecca Short hit the road in January to meet the visionaries and count the jobs.

Profitable wind farms are appearing at a rate of knots across southern Australia, shifting a formerly fringe technology into a mainstream power source. And they’re bringing jobs.

In Portland, Victoria, a homegrown business is already providing 200 jobs in the manufacture, installation and maintenance of wind turbines. Keppel Prince Engineering started in the late 1970s as a five-person outfit and now employs 500 people, with the wind energy part of the business now providing about 60 per cent of turnover.

Managing director Steve Warner says, “if we don’t do something, we’re not going to leave this planet in a very good condition for our children, their children and the planet”. But he’s also a businessman who is planning to employ twice as many people in wind turbine production in the coming years.

His company’s handiwork is evident at four major sites along the nearby coastline forming the Portland Wind Energy Project, where more than 120 wind turbines produce enough power to run 150,000 homes – roughly equivalent to the population of Geelong.

Portland was a testing ground for wind energy in Australia; it received the country’s first application for a development and saw fierce community debate about wind farm placement.

Geoff White, who was Mayor of Glenelg Shire during the whole process, says the council “saw an opportunity within the shire to promote green energy, to make a contribution to carbon pollution reduction programs, and also obviously the prospect of a great number of people being employed in manufacturing wind energy components in the shire”.

Another wind farm, near the tiny town of Waubra, north of Melbourne, will host 129 turbines when finished this year. Spanish company Acciona is behind it, and Australian MD Bret Thomas says it has delivered “something like about $200 million into various projects or various contracts to local providers”.

Half the Waubra turbines come from the Keppel Prince plant, where much of the workforce is local and receive on-the-job training in the specialised business.

“We have taken butchers, bakers and fishermen and farmers and turned them into welders, blasters, painters, vehicle operators. We are all trained on the job,” says Warner.

Zero emissions wave
Port Kembla is a working, deepwater the last port that has been dedicated for at least 100 years to steel and coal exports.

Fitting then, that a commercial wave-power developer has made the town south of Sydney its home base to produce a zero-emissions technology that has huge export potential. This means jobs, income and reliable base-load power from just the waves.

Oceanlinx has the only full-scale operational wave generator currently deployed, says MD Stuart Beaseley. “These units are fairly big, so they would tend to be built in a shipyard,” he says, adding, “during construction there are significant employment opportunities”.

Portland is getting a second bite at the renewables cherry by being scheduled for the first commercially operating wave-power generator. The Oceanlinx units, which will be almost invisible 1-2km offshore, feature an oscillating column of water that pushes air into and out of a turbine to generate electricity.

A single test unit currently generates 500kW. This is smaller than a coal-fired power station at about 600-800MW, but the wave units would be deployed in an array and expanded over time. Just as the industry standard for commercial wind turbines more than doubled in the early days, now at 1.5-2MW, Oceanlinx expects the same evolution for wave generation.

After the Portland project, it is ready to go with installations in Hawaii, South Africa, Portugal and Spain.

Other technology companies are in on the wave energy game. Perth-based CETO has developed technology that sits on the sea floor, while others use tidal currents to spin the turbine. Beaseley sees opportunity for many new businesses and technologies.

“Certainly in our company we don’t see ourselves competing with wind or wave or solar or whatever. We need all of them, and lots of them,” he says.

Green means business
The labels from Elgo Estate winery proudly boast “100% wind-powered wine”. A unique claim for any Australian winery, possibly even the world – except it’s not true.

The wind turbine on Grant and Suzie Taresch’s property actually provides twice as much energy as they use in the production of their wines. The excess is enough to provide green power to another 30 or so homes in the area.

With just one 150kW wind turbine, they cover their entire electricity bill of about $30,000 a year, plus make some money back on the renewable energy credits.

“Wineries are big users of power, in electricity and gas, basically though heating and cooling,” says Grant.

White wines in particular take a lot of chilling to get bottle-ready and reds must be kept warm through winter as getting them to ferment evenly is important.

As a marketer, Suzie is looking for the brand advantage, including their sales pitch of ‘Quality wines that don’t cost the earth’.

“We are carbon negative, we are not just carbon neutral and we are just not offsetting. We are actually actively reducing our carbon footprint and our sustainability approach to the whole process from the vineyard through to the wines,” she says.

The single wind tower, tiny by industry standards, produces electricity that if from coal power would create about a tonne of greenhouse gas per day. The winery also recycles its organic waste from grape pressing back into the soils, has protected and planted thousands of native trees, captures all the rain that falls on its roof and recycles greywater.

Sunshine for export
Wizard Power, the commercial development arm of the Australian National University, is soon to build the first commercial project using its “big dish” solar thermal technology.

Wizard’s manager of business development, Artur Sawadski, reckons “solar eventually [is] going to be big in Australia”.
Solar thermal technology solves one of the key problems of solar – getting it when you want it. First, it uses the heat of the sun to make steam that generates electricity, just like a coal-fired generator. But second, that heat can be used in a chemical reaction that splits ammonia solution into hydrogen and nitrogen gases, which can be stored at ambient temperatures. Recombine the two gases and heat is regenerated.

A mirrored, parabolic dish tracks the sun and focuses it on to a central collector. In keeping with Australia’s love of big things, the new design will have an area of 500m2, three or four times as large as any other existing example of the technology.

The first commercial project, more than 100MW in size, will be in Whyalla and due to open in 2009. Whyalla Council has been lobbying to attract local, large-scale power generation for more that a decade.

Sawadski says, “ever since its inception, it’s been a steel town... They are very much focused on being able to deliver that industrial heritage and future in a meaningful clean and green way”.

Wizard Power has an aggressive strategy for gaining energy market share and is currently working on five projects around Australia, together with an energy company partner, each one between tens to hundreds of megawatts scale. The next ones will be India and Israel and they’re also talking to contacts in China. And that means jobs.