Article by Matthew Denholm and Sarah Isonn, courtesy of The Australian.
09.10.2025
Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen is accused of misrepresenting a group that has mapped Australia’s accelerating renewables rollout and of misleading the public about its landmark data.
In a social media post, Mr Bowen accused conservation group Rainforest Reserves Australia of vastly over-estimating the footprint area of renewables projects proposed for Australia and of being “anti-renewable, pro-nuclear activists”.
“Guess what? It doesn’t stack up,” he said in a video taken in his office. “When you read claims by people who love nuclear but hate renewables, it always pays to check the facts.”
RRA vice-president Steven Nowakowski said he and his group stood by the data, which had expanded to include a further 120 renewable projects that had emerged since its report was featured in The Australian.
“Our data represents the most comprehensive compilation of existing and proposed projects, for a whole country, ever put together,” Mr Nowakowski said. “It has taken us over four years to research and find the existing projects as well as those being proposed. If Chris Bowen has better data perhaps he would like to share it with us. From our experience, governments are certainly not making it easy for the general public to see what is coming.
While Mr Nowakowski said he had made no secret of his belief that nuclear energy needed to be part of the transition away from fossil fuels, he supported renewables that were “in the right places”.
“The Energy Minister should be engaging with us and being constructive, but he’s basically just fobbing us off as being pro-nuclear,” he said. “Anyone who has legitimate concerns or real issues he just shrugs off.”
The group’s mapping – the first Australia-wide glimpse into the potential scale of the renewables rollout – has been hailed by conservationists, including former Greens leader Christine Milne, who are demanding better planning and safeguards to stop projects that destroy biodiversity. Outgoing Wilderness Society national campaigns director Amelia Young recently warned that the “renewables revolution threatens nature in many of the same extractive and colonial ways that the industrial revolution did.”
The Australian Conservation Foundation and WWF are among conservations groups calling for better planning, including renewables no-go zones and a focus on using degraded land.
In the video posted to social media, Mr Bowen claims the area to be covered by renewables is 12 per cent that revealed in the RRA data and featured in graphics in The Australian relating their overall footprint to metropolitan Sydney and Brisbane. He said the 12 per cent figure was based on calculations by the NSW Agriculture Commissioner of “how much land renewables will take, based on the plans of the Australian Energy Market Operator”.
Mr Bowen declined to justify his claim, or to explain how he derived the 12 per cent figure, when repeatedly asked to do so over the course of two days. “The response was based on initial news reporting of the map, which was not publicly or readily available,” was all a government spokesman would say. “Now that the report has been publicly released, we have had the opportunity to see the report is replete with factual errors and are even more concerned about its misleading nature.”
Following The Australian’s reporting, pro-renewables sources raised the spectre of vested interests playing a role in the RRA’s advocacy, arguing the group’s donations had tripled while grants for environmental work declined.
The Australian was also pointed to Mr Nowakowski appearing “at political events” opposing some renewable energy projects, with sources suggesting his decision to talk at such events also attended by Coalition MPs raised questions.
The NSW Agriculture Commissioner’s work appears only to show the area required in NSW – not nationally, which was the focus of the RRA mapping and The Australian’s graphic. Mr Nowakowski said it appeared the minister was confusing NSW projections with actual, real-time mapping of all existing and proposed projects nationally. “The large-scale solar projects that are already active in Australia cover 29,600ha or 16.3 per cent of the total of all solar mapped by RRA,” he said. “The active projects are mapped off satellite imagery and are accurate to a high level of confidence. Our total today, for all solar in Australia including proposed and existing projects, stands at 483,444ha, and counting.”
A November 2022 NSW Agriculture Commissioner report on the rollout of renewables in NSW calls for better mapping of where projects are likely to go. It recommends the state government “prepare and display high-level indicative mapping that identifies areas that are potential transmission routes or suitable for solar and wind developments”.
Mr Nowakowski said that, in the absence of mapping, his group was seeking to “show where these projects are … regardless of what stage of the approvals process they’re in”.
Critics of the mapping point out that five of the 843 proposed new projects it includes have been withdrawn. Mr Nowakowski said these were left in because it was common for withdrawn projects to be revised and resubmitted.
Nationals leader David Littleproud accused Mr Bowen of “puerile politics”. “Mr Bowen … fails to acknowledge the trail of destruction Labor’s all-renewables approach will leave behind,” Mr Littleproud said.