Women we admire: Aussie women leading the charge on renewable energy

Energy production can seem a blokey business, but more and more women are bringing their skills and passion to it. Genevieve Gannon meets three female power players.

Winds of change Bree Lacey, 31

Growing up spending weekends and holidays at her aunt and uncle’s farm, Bree Lacey has long had a love of the outdoors. “We always had pets. Mum always thought I’d be a real hippy.

I don’t know where that came from, but it did start at a really young age,” the Environment Business Manager says.

She majored in environmental science and zoology at university, then took up a position as an environmental consultant in construction and ended up working on the Macarthur Wind Farm in Victoria.

“It was a really deep learning curve. You develop a tough skin,” says Bree, who, as one of only two female graduates, felt outnumbered at times.

While most of the graduates focused on engineering, Bree was concerned with the conservation of significant vegetation and animals living on the grazing land in Victoria. Part of her job was to protect the striped legless lizard, a tiny marsupial called the fat-tailed dunnart and the brolga, a threatened native crane that can grow to 1.3 metres tall. “We had to do clearance to make sure there was nothing significant in the area,” Bree says. “So you’re telling the excavators where not to go. It wasn’t the easiest job, but I learnt so much from it.”

Bree is now in a senior management role in the renewables sector at AGL and one of the sites she oversees is the wind farm, the largest in the Southern Hemisphere – its 140 turbines generate enough electricity to power 173,000 homes. “We’re the only wind farm that has a significant species,” Bree says, referring to the brolga. “They return to the wind farm every year and they breed. We see the chicks.”

She feels in her element. “I always had a passion for the environment.”