General News
3 November, 2025
Mapping out renewables footprint ignites debate
DESPITE billions of dollars committed and significant time spent on the subject of renewable energy in political circles, no Australian government agency or major stakeholder has created a map to see the extent of both current and proposed projects across the nation – until now.
DESPITE billions of dollars committed and significant time spent on the subject of renewable energy in political circles, no Australian government agency or major stakeholder has created a map to see the extent of both current and proposed projects across the nation – until now.
But about three years of work from Rainforest Reserves Australia and their vice-president, Steven Nowakowski, a conservationist in Far North Queensland, has changed that, by producing an online resource that overlays wind and solar farms, transmission lines, wind farm roads, hydro projects and battery installations.
He said the project came about when he began to see the significant impacts of wind farm project developments up close and how they were in contrast to the charity group’s revegetation and wilderness protection efforts.
“More recently, we've seen a lot of the destruction being brought about by the renewables in our area, in terms of land clearing (and) fragmentation of forests,” Mr Nowakowski said.
“We've sort of pivoted a bit more over towards trying to alert people about what's going on with renewables and the scale of what is happening in the spatial footprints required.”
With an associate diploma in cartography and previous industry mapping experience in Brisbane and Cairns for their respective port authorities, Mr Nowakowski said he “just started mapping the renewable energy rollout just in North Queensland, and it just expanded and expanded”.
“Then other people within the state reached out and said, ‘Hey, Steven, can you do some mapping for Central Queensland?’” he said.
“And then it was the New England tableland. And then it was the Central Western New South Wales. And then I quickly discovered that no one's doing this.”
With the recent public announcement of the entirety of the nation now available online, the map has already made headlines, with the scale of the projects even raised in Federal Parliament; for example, the total cost of renewables was claimed to be $1.3 trillion, about four times more than what the government has said.
Another key statistic was land use, with a total land area of 433,572 hectares – greater than metropolitan Sydney – claimed needed for solar to expand from about 74 million panels to over 250 million, and wind turbines from over 4500 to over 30,000.
Climate Change and Energy minister, Chris Bowen dismissed the map’s data in a social media post, accusing RRA of exaggerating the footprint area and of being “anti-renewable, pro-nuclear activists”.
“It doesn’t stack up,” he said.
“When you read claims by people who love nuclear but hate renewables, it always pays to check the facts.”
He also claimed the land use was 12 per cent of what the RRA claimed, but was later found to be relying on NSW-only numbers, when the map was national.
A former Greens candidate, Mr Nowakowski, defended the map’s veracity and said he had “100 per cent” confidence in its accuracy, saying all the data had been gathered from publicly available documents, including from governments and sometimes even the companies behind the projects.
He claimed the map has Mr Bowen scrambling from accountability, and pointed to the lack of transparency of information from his office.
“He knows that if he were to release similar mapping, people would be upset about it,” Mr Nowakowski said.
“What's so important about the mapping is that it just gives everyone an idea of spatial scale.”
He also said criticisms about the map still showing cancelled projects was a known issue he would likely create a new category for at some point.
“One thing that we're getting criticised for is the fact that I've got five projects on there that have been withdrawn,” Mr Nowakowski said.
“So out of the 1250 projects that are there on the map ... I've left them on there because I know that most of these developments usually come back as they get resubmitted.
“What people are (saying is), ‘oh, you know, you've got this project here – that's been withdrawn’, and then they dismiss all the data, and say, ‘oh, it's all wrong’ - which it's not.”
Although he conceded his major concern was with conservation, he said he had had significant contact with people in agricultural and tourism regions during the map’s initial data expansion.
“The Oberon community, just south of Lithgow, where they've literally got thousands of wind towers going in,” he said.
“It's a really big fundamental shift to those communities, it's a complete change of their rural landscape, from one that is primarily agriculture to now industrial energy production.
“(For) a lot of these communities, it doesn't matter where they look on the horizon, they're going to see wind towers in all directions.
"So there is the fact that they feel like they're just being completely swamped. Their voices aren't being heard, and that rural aspect of their lifestyle is being lost.”
Mr Nowakowski also claimed, according to the Australian Energy Market Operator's Integrated System Plan, there was a “need to overbuild the entire electricity system by a factor of six, because of all the intermittent nature of renewables”, and this explained the sheer scale of the plans.
Mallee MP, Anne Webster, seized on the map’s data, releasing a statement slamming the government for not making this kind of information available earlier, claiming they have “kept Mallee residents in the dark on the full impact of the rollout in their communities, hoping out-of-sight, out-of-mind secretive project rollouts will not agitate metropolitan voters.”
“It is shocking that Labor so lacks the ambition to compile the transparency that this vital, informative mapping has been produced by volunteers,” she said.
“Australians can now see the impact for themselves. Every proposed wind or solar generation project is online and clickable, showing the size of the installation.”
She said she was keen to see the map updated soon with two proposed local projects.
“This is before the mapping includes the proposed 240 kilometres of VNI-West and 110km of WIRES transmission lines that will attract more energy company cowboys to pick off landowners and divide communities,” Dr Webster said.
“I commend RRA and Steven for their service to the nation with this huge piece of work that every Australian needs to know about.”
Mr Nowakowski said he was simply about making the information more easily accessible and welcomed any support people might give.
“There's three ways people can help out, firstly, just by going on the website and subscribing to us, and that sort of gives us more strength working with policy advisors and so forth, when we can say that we've got X number of supporters,” he said.
“Secondly, donations, because we're all doing this for free. No one pays us to do this. We're just doing it because we believe in it. We think Australians have the right to know what's going on in their regional areas, and also it shows environment groups that they really need to step up to the plate and start protecting some of these wild areas that are being impacted.
“And thirdly, we want people, if they find errors, to let us know, because we want to keep this map as a live document that is current and contemporary, and we want to make sure that the data is right.”
He said he hoped the map would enable greater understanding of rural Australia.
“I want, more than anything, just the city people to sympathise with regional communities, because we hear so much in the media that they feel like they're not being listened to their areas of being industrialised,” Mr Nowakowski said.
“And city folk just (say), ‘Well, you regional communities (have) just got to do the heavy lifting to reach net zero.’
“But I don't think they really understand the scale of what is required and some of the sacrifices that regional communities need to take to do this.”
The RRA online map can be found at bit.ly/RRAmapOz – be aware that the page takes some time to load.