Landowners in stoush over massive solar farm
‘‘ FOR ME, AND MANY OTHERS, IT WILL BE A DISASTER TOM SHEW
Photo: Lachie Millard
WHEN Tom Shew retired, he headed for the hills outside Warwick on the Darling Downs, choosing a home site overlooking the picturesque Freestone Valley.
But his idyllic views of lush farmland and dairy cattle are about to be blotted out by 250,000 large solar panels.
Shew, 71, a horticultural scientist and educator, said he will have virtually no other views except the panels once the $125 million Freestone Valley project is complete.
“I will see solar panels from my living room, the bedroom, the rumpus room and the patio,” he said. “For me, and many others, it will be a disaster.”
Shew and his neighbours in the Sladevale community fear they will suffer reflective glare, as each of the 2.6m solar panels have been designed to tilt up and down to follow the path of the sun. Each panel has a little motor.
In its application, Terrain Solar said glare and noise would be minimal. However, Shew said a web-based interactive tool used to measure glare was fed the wrong co-ordinates.
He checked his address on Google Maps and discovered his longitudinal and latitudinal co-ordinates differ from those on the official assessment to council. Shew questioned whether the GlareGauge desktop tool can accurately assess glare anyway, because of undulations in the ground.
His neighbour, Meryl Strand, 65, a foreign exchange analyst, agreed. She will see the panels from her bathtub.
Strand says Shew’s research puts a cloud over the solar farm’s approvals.
Strand said the Southern Downs Regional Council made a dreadful mistake in approving the farm. “They dismissed legitimate community concerns about glare, noise, and the threat of fire and flooding,” she said.
Unlike her hilltop neighbours, Karen Green, 55, says she will look up to the panels. Her farm is down the hill in flood-prone Campbell’s Gully, and a corner of the solar farm will be just 32m from the corner post of her horse stud.
“It’s on top of me. I’m in the corner looking up,” she says.
The community believed the solar farm should have been built away from families.
As well as the large, moving solar panels, residents will look down on a research centre and up to 20 electric current “inverters” the size of shipping containers.
Engineer Mark Pierce, who lives further down the hill, says each inverter has fans that will emit a humming sound.
Pierce, 42, does not believe the noise threat was properly assessed. And he raises questions about the roles of the University of Queensland and the Queensland Government in the approval process.
Although the project was initiated by Terrain Solar, it will soon fall into the ownership of the university.
Vice-chancellor Peter Hoj says UQ may be energy neutral by 2020. The solar farm will generate about 154,000 megawatt hours of energy a year — enough to power 27,000 homes.
Hoj says the solar farm will also become a teaching and research facility.
“We are already the largest solar generator among Australian universities, and this initiative will complement the 50,000 existing solar panels on our campuses. This project makes a clear and bold statement about UQ’s commitment to leadership in renewables.”