More light has been shone on the wild anti-renewable claims in Channel 7’s Spotlight program that was aired earlier this week, particularly around its claims about the number of wind turbines that will be built in Australia and the space they may occupy.
The Spotlight program focus on Congo cobalt mines and its claims of a slavery scandal in Australia’s grid scale battery and home battery production has already been debunked, because very few of them use cobalt at all.
See our story here: Wild attack on batteries and renewables by 7’s Spotlight program falls over at the first fact check
But the issues addressed in that article barely scratched the surface of where the program went wrong. There were also wild – and previously debunked – claims about the number and space to be taken up by wind turbines in Australia.
The Spotlight program claimed that more than 31,000 new wind turbines would be needed to meet Australia’s renewable energy target. It seemed the program got confused with gigawatts and turbines.
But the average turbine the Australian Energy Market Operator’s Draft 2026 Integrated System Plan (ISP), assumes that total onshore wind capacity is projected to increase from around 14 gigawatts (GW) to around 50 GW in 2050.
And given the current average size of wind turbines is now 6 MW – and many new installations are even bigger at 7 MW to 8 MW – then the total number of wind turbines across Australia to be built in the next 34 years is closer to 6,000 – not more than 31,000.
Then there is the question of the space taken up by the these turbines, and the solar panels installed for new utility scale PV projects.
Spotlight claimed that equivalent to 7 times the entire spatial footprint of Tasmania will be “covered in steel and glass” from renewable energy projects. It quoted Steven Nowakowski, from the now disbanded Rainforests Australia group that was widely criticised in the recent Senate inquiry into energy and climate misinformation.
Again, this is false.
The Clean Energy Council cites research from Professor Andrew Blakers from the Australian National University that calculated overall land use requirements to get to one hundred per cent renewables is about 1,200 square kilometres, or 0.02 per cent of Australia’s total landmass.
That is also less than 2 per cent of the spacial footprint of Tasmania.
“That is nowhere close to the total land footprint for renewables claimed by Steven Nowakowski,” the CEC says.
Blakers has also noted that replacing all of Australia’s coal-fired power stations due to retire by 2040 with solar farms alone would require less than 0.016 per cent of Australia’s total land area.
Another of the claims aired by 7’s Spotlight is the oft-debunked one that koalas will be euthanised – with blunt force – to make way for new wind projects.
False, says the CEC. “This has never happened and has long been debunked,” it says. “This is a claim designed to shock and has not occurred during the construction of a renewable energy project anywhere in Australia.”
William Churchill , the CEC Chief Policy and Impact Officer, says the Spotlight program has “fallen well short” of its audience’s expectations for accurate and fair reporting.
“The program’s use of long-discredited claims and the catalogue of misinformation aired around batteries, failed basic journalism principles,” Churchill said in a statement.
“As the recent Senate inquiry into energy discourse made clear, selective or misleading narratives erode public trust, distort policy debate, and ultimately delay investment and infrastructure delivery.
“At a time when Australia urgently needs to transition our energy system, as coal taps out, we can’t afford to be getting the basics wrong.”
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Giles Parkinson
Giles Parkinson is founder and editor-in-chief of Renew Economy, and founder and editor of its EV-focused sister site The Driven. He is the co-host of the weekly Energy Insiders Podcast. Giles has been a journalist for more than 40 years and is a former deputy editor of the Australian Financial Review. You can find him on LinkedIn and on Twitter.
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