In Girgarre East, neighbouring landowners are up in arms over the Future Renewable Vision project, which is pending Victorian Government planning permit approval.
If the project goes ahead Gary and Jane Pekin’s bedroom window will be 120m from the first row of solar panels and 500m from the battery storage area.
The couple runs a trotting horse farm, with Mr Pekin working as a professional harness racing trainer and driver while Mrs Pekin does shift work at the Stanhope Fonterra factory.
“A lot of farmers are spewing because it is one of the best cropping farms in the district,” Mrs Pekin said.
“Not only will it be an eyesore, what’s it going to do to our property values? For farmers, your farm is your superannuation.”
Mr and Mrs Pekin are also worried about the effect construction could have on their livestock and resident wedge-tailed eagles.
“We’ve got no issue with solar, we’ve got it on our house, but what we do have an issue with is them using the best farm in the district to drill 27,520 steel poles into the ground and raise 172,000 panels,” Mr Pekin said.
The property being considered by FRV is a roughly 220ha lot currently used for cropping and running lambs.
Meanwhile, residents along Old Corop Rd say the road will be unable to cope with the expected traffic during construction of a 440MW solar farm 6km north of Rushworth.
Construction of the Corop solar farm will begin in the final months of 2021 after plans were approved by Campaspe Shire Council last month, with almost 1.2 million solar panels to be installed over 24 months on the 1100 ha site.
Councillors unanimously passed the motion at the last council meeting on May 19.
The traffic report submitted to Campaspe Shire Council by Leeson Group said at the peak of construction — the first three months — 79 heavy vehicles a day would be travelling along Old Corop Rd each way.
Over 12 months, 2667 12m shipping containers will be transported to the site.
The report stated most of the 700 people working on the site during construction would come to the site via minibus, with 88 a day transporting workers to and from the site each way every day.
Old Corop Rd resident Hugh Barlow lives less than 1km from the site and spoke against the proposal at the May 19 meeting.
He told council the prospect of 334 daily trips — 176 inbound and 176 outbound — was too much for the road to handle and he feared for the safety of residents using the road.
The road is sealed but little more than one lane wide, with the shoulders of the road dirt and gravel.
He said for a 10-hour work day there would be vehicles travelling along the road at an average of one every two minutes, which could be dangerous with soft shoulders and some drop-offs along the side of Old Corop Rd.
“The road can handle B-doubles and semi-trailers, yes, if they’re on the road, but if they’re passing each other up and down and up and down, the shoulders aren’t in a condition where they can handle that,” he said.
He told councillors there were many places where the sealed road width was “far less” than 4m and was concerned by the one-lane bridge over the channel, which had “poor vision”.
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