Eungella as renewables sacrifice zone? Why the Greens should oppose the Pioneer-Burdekin pumped hydro energy storage project

When bushwalking along rougher trails in dense rainforest, you often spend a lot of time looking down at the track itself. Between snakes, leeches, muddy patches and trip hazards, there’s plenty of reasons to focus on where your feet are going, which means you can sometimes forget to look up.

When you do raise your gaze towards the canopy, your field of vision widens abruptly, and you’re reminded just how vast and complex the forest is… How much it changes with the weather, the seasons, and the time of day… how you could hike this same track a hundred times and still be surprised by it... how nothing is ever as certain and settled as some people might insist.

Recently I’ve had the pleasure of some long bushwalks through parts of Eungella National Park, about 80km west of Mackay. It’s an amazing part of the world, well-known to environmentalists because it’s one of the most reliable locations in the country to spot wild platypus in their natural habitat. But it’s also home to a diverse array of other native flora and fauna species, many of which are listed as vulnerable or endangered and aren’t found anywhere else, including the Eungella Day Frog, the Eungella spiny crayfish and the Eungella shade skink.

Queensland’s Labor government has proposed to build the Pioneer-Burdekin Pumped Hydro Energy Storage (PHES) scheme – they suggest it’s the largest such system in the world – just outside the boundaries of Eungella National Park. Pumped hydro storage basically works by using electricity to pump water uphill and store it in an upper reservoir – usually an artificial dam. Then when you want to use the energy, you release some of that water to flow downhill into a lower reservoir – a second dam – turning turbines that convert the water’s kinetic energy back into electricity.

Crucially, almost two years since it was announced, the project still lacks the public support of Birri Gubba First Nations landowner groups.

The project has attracted much more opposition and media coverage than the smaller and simpler Borumba PHES Project near Imbil, south of Gympie. A Save Eungella community campaign led by local residents has been advocating strongly against it, and the LNP has promised to cancel the project if it wins government in October.

This opposition occurs in the context of a well-resourced nationwide push against renewable energy projects, with climate change deniers and fossil fuel industry financiers often stoking and exaggerating fears about localised environmental impacts. Many worthy renewables projects around the country – particularly wind and solar farms – have been slowed or completely derailed using various planning and environmental protection mechanisms, prolonging the global harm caused by the fossil fuel industry.

Climate justice advocates who criticise specific renewables projects due to local environmental harms rightly worry that the concerns they raise will be misappropriated and weaponised to argue against the broader (and long overdue) renewable energy transition. Some environmentalists have been dangerously naive about this risk, and have caused more harm to the climate movement by uncritically allowing themselves to be used to legitimise and add credibility to anti-renewables campaigns.

So in writing about this stuff, I should emphasise that the very real threat of global warming necessitates an immediate transition away from fossil fuels towards renewable energy. Alternative proposals such as nuclear power are also not a viable solution, as they are slower and more expensive to bring online than renewable energy technologies, and have their own negative environmental impacts and waste products.

But while it’s important to vocally support new renewable energy projects in general, I do think we need to be asking some tough questions about the Pioneer-Burdekin pumped hydro energy storage proposal. When we take our eyes off the narrow track we’ve been walking and consider the wider rainforest, the government’s insistence that this project is ‘essential’ seems increasingly questionable.

What does this project involve?

The Pioneer-Burdekin PHES project (named after the two river catchments it impacts) would store a whopping 5 gigawatts of energy (120 gigawatt-hours) and has been controversial primarily because it requires creation of three new dams – two smaller upper reservoirs in Dalrymple Heights and one lower reservoir in Netherdale – each of which will require resumption of dozens of private residential homes and farms.

Even the ‘smaller’ reservoirs are pretty big. All up, according to Queensland Hydro (the state government-owned entity overseeing the project), the project footprint will be an estimated 937 hectares – about the size of the entire council electorate of the Gabba Ward that I used to represent. But Wivenhoe Dam, for comparison, is 10940 hectares – over eleven times larger.

The government estimates the project will cost $12 billion, but everyone knows it'll end up more expensive than that. When you think about it, it’s wild that such a costly project was announced in such a rush, with so little early-stage public input. The cost itself doesn't worry me so much – renewable energy storage infrastructure is a good thing to be investing in – but the large amount of non-renewable resources that will be used in construction (reflected in the massive project budget) is definitely a concern.

Although the proposed reservoirs are technically outside Eungella National Park, it’s important to remember that national park boundaries often have more to do with which private landowners were historically willing to sell or donate their properties for conservation purposes, than which areas are most deserving of conservation and restoration.

Just because land isn’t part of a government-gazetted conversation reserve doesn’t mean it has no ecological value. Moreover, the tunnels connecting the reservoirs will be dug under the national park, and some high voltage power lines and towers will likely be constructed in and across the park.

Queensland Hydro estimates that approximately 86% of the project area for the reservoirs has previously been cleared or ‘developed’ for housing and farming – mostly ‘natural grazing’ i.e. cleared paddocks for cows – leaving 14% as “a mix of regrowth and high value remnant vegetation.”

In my experience, capitalist governments (just like private corporations) are strongly predisposed to underestimate how much natural vegetation their projects will destroy. Not only will Pioneer-Burdekin involve damming and permanently flooding multiple valleys – it will also likely necessitate further clearing beyond the reservoir boundaries for access roads, high voltage powerlines etc. However as shown in the above map, the 'project area' (yellow boundaries) is much larger than the footprint of the actual reservoirs.

With all this in mind, environmentalists could reasonably assume that at most, this project will either completely destroy or have a significant detrimental impact on up to 200 hectares of ecologically significant forests and smaller waterways, and probably more like 100 hectares (noting that the other 800 hectares of cleared grazing/farmland also has some ecological value, and if it isn’t flooded, could be further revegated and restored in future, with some blocks eventually amalgamated into the national park).

It’s important to place that destruction in the context of the apocalyptic scale of tree-clearing across Queensland over the past few years. Detailed analysis suggests 2 million hectares of native vegetation has been cleared across Queensland over a 5 year period, including half a million hectares of koala habitat. Reasonable people can debate the exact number, but we’re definitely talking hundreds of thousands of hectares every year.

The areas of forest at risk from the Pioneer-Burdekin pumped hydro project are probably of higher ecological value than most of that 2 million hectares. But even so, it’s worth emphasising that any politician who claims to be concerned about the 100 to 200 hectares that might be destroyed near Eungella should be much more vocal about the hundreds of thousands of hectares that are being cleared every year for mines, cattle crazing and other profit-driven industries.

Yes, the project is definitely going to clear some native forest, but it's nothing compared to, for example, the 770 hectares of koala habitat that will be cleared for the recently-approved Vulcan South coal mine near Moranbah.

Not a swing seat

Hard-right political forces – including the Liberal National Party and One Nation – have already come out against the Pioneer-Burdekin pumped hydro project. It’s obvious from those parties’ track records that this is not so much because they’re deeply concerned about the environmental impacts, but because it's a convenient rallying point for their broader nationwide crusade against the transition from fossil fuels to renewables.

The project falls within the state electorate of Mirani, represented by Stephen Andrew, whose biggest claim to fame is that he boasted about shooting a dingo, posting photos of the dead animal on social media. He was elected to Parliament as a member of One Nation in 2017, but was disendorsed by the party in early August 2024, and at the time of writing is sitting as an independent.

Because Mirani is generally considered very right-wing, neither major party cares too much about it from an electoral perspective. Labor has given up on winning it back, and of course the LNP are more focused on winning Labor-held electorates in Townsville and Mackay. Whether Stephen Andrew retains Mirani as an independent, or the LNP win it off him, is largely irrelevant to which party will form government after the October state election.

It’s probably a shame for the residents of Eungella/Netherdale/Dalrymple Heights that their electorate is perceived as so resoundingly conservative – they’d get more attention from the establishment if political strategists saw them as a swing seat.

Meanwhile the Greens primary vote in Mirani has generally hovered between 2% and 4% in recent state elections, so the party currently sees little strategic value in allocating significant resources or energy towards it during election campaigns.

But there are other reasons why the Greens need to pay close attention to this huge public infrastructure project and the tensions it embodies. Global warming means we’ll all have to make some very tough decisions about what we let go of, and what we try to preserve. It won’t be good enough for the Greens to simply defer to government-commissioned ecological reports and cost-benefit analyses.

Global warming means mass displacement is near-inevitable

Since the government announced the pumped hydro project, multiple news stories have featured families whose properties might be resumed to make way for the reservoirs. While the numbers have shifted back and forth as project planning progresses, all up it seems like about 80 properties – many of which are larger cattle grazing blocks – would be compulsorily acquired.

While the government claims the project will create jobs and deliver an economic boost for the broader Pioneer Valley (spending $12 billion on anything would create a lot of jobs), it will literally flood the village of Netherdale, with likely negative flow-on effects to the settlement of Eungella further up the mountain; the two villages are pretty symbiotic in terms of services and workforces e.g. in 2023, Eungella State School reported just 24 enrolments, several of which are kids from Netherdale.

On my mum’s side of the family, I have a few ancestors/relatives who were displaced from their homes and farms by the construction of Somerset Dam and later Wivenhoe Dam. Working as a city councillor, I also connected with and supported residents whose properties were resumed for public projects (both worthwhile projects like new schools, and unnecessary ones like road expansions). So I have a lot of sympathy for the people whose homes would be resumed to make way for the proposed reservoirs around Eungella. Having to uproot and relocate is hard – especially for families who’ve lived on the same property for generations.

But the harsh reality of colonial capitalism is that every single year, tens of thousands of Queensland renters are forced to move away from homes they love. It’s also pretty common – and necessary – for governments to directly qacquire the private properties of owner-occupiers for a broad range of public projects. Many of our schools, hospitals and roads were created via forced resumptions (often necessitated because of poor long-term planning).

In 2017, in the suburb of East Brisbane (where I live), the Liberal National Party-led city council (with the support of Labor councillors and MPs) compulsorily acquired around 50 residential homes – which housed well over 100 residents – just to widen a 750-metre stretch of Lytton Road from 4 lanes to 6 lanes. It was a stupid, wasteful project that didn’t meaningfully reduce traffic congestion and shouldn’t have gone ahead. But resumptions like this occur fairly often.

For LNP politicians to oppose the Pioneer-Burdekin Pumped Hydro scheme on the grounds that forced resumptions are inherently wrong seems a little two-faced when their party has a strong track record of supporting and undertaking compulsory acquisitions for other projects.

When you think about it, the entire nation of Australia was founded on stealing Aboriginal land without even paying fair compensation. How many of us have thought deeply about whose land we’re really living on, and what we might be able to do to help redress the wrongs of colonisation? What right do we have to be outraged about compulsory acquisitions for public projects when the original land thefts we benefit from remain unrectified?

The human population of Netherdale and Dalrymple Heights (including those living on properties that won’t be resumed) totals less than 200 people. While Eungella region locals won’t like hearing this, the hard truth is that the displacement of a couple hundred residents isn’t by itself a strong enough argument against a project if that project serves the broader long-term collective interest.

But these discussions are also a good reminder that the number of people who might be displaced or detrimentally affected by renewable energy/storage projects is miniscule compared to the thousands of Australians who’ll be displaced by global warming in the near future, or the hundreds of thousands who could be uprooted if we continue burning and exporting fossil fuels at current rates.

Entire, densely-populated suburbs along Queensland’s east coast are extremely vulnerable to sea level rise and severe storms as the planet warms, while several inland regions will become almost uninhabitable due to persistent heatwaves and water shortages. Even if some residents don’t want to relocate, governments won’t want to spend huge sums maintaining water supplies, road connections and other services for a few holdouts. More and more often, government officials – including future Greens MPs – are going to find themselves in the difficult position of having to tell people that they have to move. So we have to get better at making such decisions democratically, and recognise that forcing a transition via top-down authoritarian declarations will prove more socially harmful in the long run.

So do we really need pumped hydro storage?

If the Queensland government already had another, better location to create 5 gigawatts of pumped hydro energy storage without displacing residents and flooding farmland and forest, it probably wouldn’t have chosen Eungella. But the combination of a very sparsely populated area, big elevation differences between the proposed upper and lower reservoirs, and the fact that most of the land needed for reservoirs has already been cleared for grazing, is hard to beat.

You can find numerous articles and research papers online about the relative benefits and costs (both financial and environmental) of different energy storage options. While pumped hydro storage requires lots of space, any kind of conventional battery technology also has significant potential environmental impacts in terms of the resources used in construction.

Almost everyone accepts we’ll need more energy storage capacity in the near future. But exactly how much we need, and how centralised that storage capacity should be, is still open to debate.

Too often, mainstream discussions about climate action focus simplistically on replacing fossil fuel energy sources with renewables without contemplating other major changes to society. This is a deeply naive and misguided mindset, but it’s seen as an easier message to sell politically than acknowledging the hard truth: Minimising and adapting to global warming (while avoiding hundreds of millions of deaths across the globe) means we will have to make far bigger changes to how we produce food, how we moved around, and where we live, beyond just replacing coal, gas and oil with solar and wind.

The problem with trying to transition away from fossil fuels while maintaining a broadly capitalist economic system is that demand for more energy is insatiable. Even if we could snap our fingers and instantly convert the whole nation to 100% renewables (including replacing millions of oil-powered cars with sustainable transport modes), profit-driven, growth-oriented companies would still keep demanding more energy – more solar arrays, more wind farms, more storage – especially if the cost per kilowatt-hour is reducing. Numerous examples throughout history demonstrate that in a capitalist framework, falling resource costs, or technological improvements that increase efficiency, lead to rising usage (search for terms like ‘rebound effect,’ ‘Jevons paradox’ and the ‘Khazzoom-Brookes postulate’ to read more on this).

Queensland government plans and Australian Energy Market Operator models are predicated on the assumptions that energy usage will keep rising indefinitely, and that it won’t be possible to significantly shift the times of day when power demand peaks.

Reading the government's Supergrid Blueprint, it seems as though the size and location of the proposed Pioneer-Burdekin PHES is also influenced in part by the Queensland government's heavy reliance on the private sector to deliver much of the new renewable energy generation capacity the state will need, and many of those projects would be less viable without this publicly-funded storage capacity.

You could go so far as to argue that sinking $12 billion+ of public funds into 5 gigawatts of pumped hydro energy storage is actually a futile procrastination attempt to avoid the deeper changes our society urgently needs to address not only global warming but so many other system failures (housing, worker exploitation etc.).

So rather than accepting dominant capitalist narratives that we simply need X gigawatts of energy storage capacity, the Greens should play the responsible role of arguing that both individual households and entire industries (especially bigger businesses) will have to shift to using electricity at different times of the day, and that we have to transform society so we require less energy overall.

Climate action advocates who claim our only choice is between burning more fossil fuels, or embracing mass energy storage that causes significant localised environmental destruction, are misleading themselves. The Greens must resist getting trapped within such narrow parameters of debate.

What’s the Greens’ current position?

No political party or independent environmental advocacy group has the resources to comprehensively evaluate every single, potentially controversial major project across the country. Rather, the important role they (mostly) play is to argue for stronger environmental and planning protections in general, so we can all have greater confidence that government approvals weren't tainted by the influence of big business.

To date, the Queensland Greens have stopped short of clearly opposing the Pioneer-Burdekin pumped hydro storage project. The party’s current position is best summarised by these comments from Senator Larissa Waters:

“The Greens want to see an expansion of renewable energy alongside green storage, including battery and pumped hydro, to get our country off expensive and dirty coal and gas.
We support large scale publicly owned energy storage, but we do have concerns about the government’s failure to consult properly with the local community, and particularly the local traditional owners, on this project. Like all projects, renewable energy and storage must go through proper environmental assessment processes to determine whether they are the right fit for the location, alongside community consultation to ensure locals can have a say and hear the benefits of the project.
The Greens have been pushing Labor to fix our federal environmental approvals process, and to review the state’s planning laws to ensure better community consultation and environmental assessments on renewable projects.
We need stronger environmental laws, not expensive, untested nuclear or new coal or gas. The move from coal and gas to cleaner, cheaper renewables will bring down energy bills and create hundreds of thousands of jobs, especially in regional areas.”

To summarise, the Queensland Greens support the general principle of pumped hydro storage, but want to see more detailed information about the specific environmental and social impacts of the Pioneer-Burdekin project.

What approach should the Greens take?

Given the complexities, I can see why the Greens have so far avoided expressing a clear, specific view on Pioneer-Burdekin PHES.

But having spent a bit of time looking into it, including delving into Queensland Hydro reports, seeking insights from long-running on-the-ground environmental organisations, and hearing from residents directly involved in campaigning against Pioneer-Burdekin, I’m increasingly convinced that the Greens should publicly oppose it.

Perhaps relevantly, after corresponding with key members of the locally-based ‘Save Eungella’ campaign, I don’t believe it’s an astro-turfed front for the fossil fuel industry or the Liberal National Party. The campaign has undeniably attracted and energised plenty of climate change-deniers and fossil fuel proponents, and some of the group’s messaging and arguments against the project are a little hyperbolic and sensationalist. But the group is right that the project will fragment wildlife corridors and destroy habitat that’s home to threatened species. You can't offset that just by planting more saplings somewhere else.

In a world of rapidly declining biodiversity, where natural green spaces are routinely destroyed in the name of progress and profit, the Greens have an important political role to play in insisting that the transition to renewables mustn’t come at the cost of ecologically significant landscapes. Governments will always be tempted to locate new energy projects in sparsely-populated areas with greater ecological value. The Greens’ initial, default orientation towards such schemes should be one of strong scepticism.

The deeper reason for opposing Pioneer-Burdekin is simply that mega-projects suck. They almost always run way over budget and behind deadline. They soak up labour power and resources, with negative flow-on impacts to other projects, and their complexity means that one miscalculation or unforeseen disruption can be amplified into major downstream issues over the life of the project. Key externalities are too easily excluded from a project’s cost-benefit calculations – where will workers live? how will they travel to site? what will this mean for the region’s housing market?

Queensland Hydro won't have the capacity to deliver Pioneer-Burdekin in-house, which means outsourcing to large private contractors (via opaque tender processes that add more costly bureaucracy) who'll treat it as a blank cheque cash cow. This reliance on profit-driven private construction and engineering companies greatly reduces government oversight, opening the door for corner-cutting and de facto extortion.

Mega-projects develop a huge degree of momentum, and so operate on an entirely different level in terms of acceptable collateral impacts. “What’s that? Turns out the new road can’t go that way because the landslide risk is higher than we expected? Well we can’t cancel the contracts now... Guess we’ll have to ram it through the middle of the national park after all!”

Governments like mega-projects because they make for impressive headlines, and they generally ask less of the politicians themselves – appoint a delivery authority, allocate an open-ended budget and spend the next decade talking about job creation and nation-building. But rather than building one 5-gigawatt energy storage project at Eungella, it would probably be more cost-effective and environmentally sustainable to deliver five or ten smaller storage projects around the state. Of course that would require much more political energy – more time for consulting with local councils, residents and other stakeholders, more community meetings, more tendering processes, more ministerial briefings etc.

The other argument against a mega-project like this is that concentrating power infrastructure of such scale and significance in one location increases the risk from future disasters and unforeseen disruptions. In an increasingly unstable world, decentralised, diversified, localised systems will be more resilient than connecting four or five giant solar arrays and wind farms to one massive pumped hydro storage site. Governments might prefer centralised infrastructure because of the ease of control and administration, but spreading investment around would probably serve the long-term public interest better.

For me, the other compelling reason not to support this project is that the initial decision-making and consultation process was appallingly undemocratic, and needs to be rejected on principle. Palaszczuk’s surprise announcement in September 2022 exemplified so much of what people hate about top-down centralised governance. It seems they didn’t even bother finding out whether Birri Gubba landowner groups were open to the proposal before making it a central element of their ‘Queensland Supergrid Infrastructure Blueprint.’

Labor’s ham-fisted approach of declaring that they were definitely doing something, then half-heartedly consulting the community after the announcement, not only undermined support for this particular project, but unnecessarily handed extra ammunition to the anti-renewables/pro-apocalypse crowd who are determined to derail the broader transition off fossil fuels.

As mentioned above, over the coming years we’ll face plenty of tough collective decisions, not just about which landscapes and ecosystems we do and don’t sacrifice in favour of new housing, food production and energy projects, or which communities have to relocate due to global warming impacts, but also what luxuries and habits we’ll all have to give up. It’s crucial for the Greens to insist that these decisions are made via genuinely democratic, participatory processes, not behind-closed-doors top-down planning.

The Greens should announce that the party opposes Pioneer-Burdekin PHES because:

• the project so far appears to lack the support of First Nations landowner groups
• the initial decision-making process wasn’t sufficiently democratic or participatory
• even where a renewable energy project has merits, this scale of local environmental impacts – truncating wildlife corridors and clearing 100 to 200 hectares of native forest fringing a national park – is an unacceptable amount of collateral damage

Throwing the party’s weight and resources directly behind community campaigns that are easily co-opted by anti-renewables climate change denialists would be a strategic misstep. However it should be possible for the Greens to give comments to the media and publish statements online explaining that the party opposes the current Pioneer-Burdekin proposal, but still supports a rapid transition from fossil fuels to renewables – a transition process that brings the whole community along for the ride.

No single politician, private consultancy firm or government decision-making body will ever be adequately equipped to meaningfully weigh up all the pros and cons of such massive project proposals. A truly ‘just’ transition requires that the larger a project, the more democratic involvement there must be, right from its outset. A $12 billion+ project to construct three dams right next to a National Park clearly needed more meaningful community participation – not just after-the-fact consultation.

The beauty of a more democratic approach towards planning our energy transition is that it would yield better-quality decisions that account for a broader range of costs and benefits. And if the wider public has been involved from the outset, project funding and support is more likely to remain secure even as government administrations change. As it is, if an LNP government wins power either this October or in four years’ time (before work is fully underway) they’re likely to cancel Pioneer-Burdekin PHES anyway.

It’s hard for environmental groups or parties like the Greens to come out against a major project that government experts claim is pivotal to the renewable energy transition. It would be much easier to just sit this one out. But in the long-run, that could actually strengthen new political formations and coalitions where anti-renewables campaigns become some of the most prominent and vocal defenders of certain natural green spaces, while the Greens continue to be mischaracterised as a subservient appendage of Labor governments.

This is rugged, tangled terrain. But the Greens would do well to remember that there are multiple tracks through the forest.

I hope you found this article insightful. It might be hard to believe, but even though Pioneer-Burdekin PHES seems to be Queensland's largest public infrastructure project (excluding never-ending 'upgrades' to the Bruce Highway), right now no-one is producing in-depth, publicly-accessible commentary and analysis of projects like this through an anti-capitalist environmentalist lens. Non-profit conservation groups are understandably focussed on the bigger struggle against new fossil fuel projects, and no-one else seems to be making the time. So if you want critical commentary like this to exist in the public realm, please consider supporting it by signing up for a paid subscription.