The imminent rebooting of the mothballed Redbank Power Station with wood (biomass) from NSW’s native forests will make it Australia’s most polluting power station and an existential threat to the future of our children and wildlife.
Hunter Energy is currently seeking expressions of interest for timber from north of Grafton, West of Dubbo and South of Batemans Bay to fuel their Redbank Power Station, with plans to restart the facility in mid 2021 fed by native forests to make it one of world’s ten biggest biomass power plants.
The community needs to urgently speak up to stop the NSW and Commonwealth Governments from allowing this environmental disaster.
Please sign onto our campaign below as a first step to keep our forests standing.
Burning trees to power Redbank Coal Station is an existential threat to our future.
It's a climate nightmare.
- It will release some 1.8 million tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere each year to fuel climate change, increased droughts, heatwaves and more intense bushfires, while increasing forest degradation and hastening species extinctions.
It's polluting and expensive.
- Replacing coal with biomass is even more polluting, releasing up to 50% more CO2 than coal to generate equivalent amounts of energy.
- Biomass electricity is three times more expensive than solar to produce and requires massive public subsidies.
It undermines the climate mitigation potential of forests.
- Native forests remove carbon dioxide from the air more effectively than anything else on land; they make and ‘catch’ rain and they moderate temperature. They do this best when they're left alone.
It threatens our future forests, water security and struggling wildlife.
- As both public and private forests become increasingly devoid of large sawlogs the push is on to take smaller and more defective trees to make money.
- Forest wildlife will be impacted most severely as forest degradation skyrockets with all those previously uneconomic trees taken. This gives our forests no chance to become future refuges for wildlife and people.
- Forests are natural water reservoirs that feed our streams and generate rainfall. If we loose our forests we diminish our water security.
We need to:
- Pay farmers to leave trees standing to go on sequestering and storing atmospheric carbon and grow habitat for Koalas and our other imperilled species
- Stop subsidising corporations to profit from clearing, logging and climate emissions.
- Invest in clean energy jobs (solar and wind) and leave fossil fuels and forests in the ground.
Please sign onto our campaign below as a first step to keep our forests standing.
Who's signing
