One landowner can’t stop the energy transition: TransGrid CEO

afr.com:

Energy ministers from Australia’s two biggest states have called for the nation to “get on” with building transmission networks as TransGrid boss Brett Redman warned the electricity operator was prepared to compulsorily acquire properties along the route of the proposed 360-kilometre HumeLink.

While just over 50 per cent of private landowners alongthe HumeLink route had agreed to accept financial compensation for their properties, and TransGrid hoped to get 100 per cent of landholders to sign consents, the company is prepared to compulsorily traverse the land of those that refuse, Mr Redman said.

“We may well get to the point, as we did with a very small number on EnergyConnect, where we have to lean into the compulsory process, it can be unavoidable,” Mr Redman told The Australian Financial Review Energy & Climate Summit in Sydney.

TransGrid CEO Brett Redman is prepared to compulsorily acquire properties in the path of the HumeLink transmission project. Oscar Colman

“When you’re building a project many, many hundreds of kilometres long you can’t skip a property, and we can’t afford as a community for one property to stop the big energy transition.”

TransGrid is building large parts of the so-called “southern superhighway”, which includes the EnergyConnect, HumeLink and VNI West projects in NSW, Victoria and South Australia.

Residents protesting the construction of new poles and wires for HumeLink have claimed it would be cheaper to put them underground over the long term but NSW Energy Minister Penny Sharpe said it would be too expensive and would take too long, and that underground networks also sterilised large swathes of farm land.

Ms Sharpe warned consumers would ultimately end up paying for the new transmission