Win and Jim Arnold live in a tropical paradise.

Lush rainforest surrounds the small home they built for themselves nestled among the hills of the Eungella range just west of Mackay in north Queensland.

A fast-flowing creek provides sustenance to many plants and wildlife, but the couple’s ideal life could all soon be about to change.

The Queensland government’s Pioneer-Burdekin Pumped Hydro project would drown most of their property.

The Arnolds say they’re at the precipice of the juggle between investment in new clean energy and the impact it could have on their local environment.

It’s a social and economic cost they’re trying to come to terms with.

“We’ve had our moments of anger, disbelief,” Mrs Arnold said.

The $12 billion project in the Pioneer Valley is the centrepiece of the landmark 10-year Queensland Energy and Jobs plan which is estimated to support up to 100,000 jobs by 2040.

The plan aims to have 50 per cent of the state powered by renewable energy by 2030, 70 per cent by 2032 and 80 per cent by 2035.

Resumptions begin

But the Pioneer-Burdekin project would effectively see the community of Netherdale, where Jim and Win Arnold live, wiped out.

In the small community, houses have been boarded up. Temporary fences have been put up, with keep-out signs ominously displayed.

Property records show these homes are now owned by Queensland Hydro, the state-owned organisation developing the project.

According to CoreLogic, Queensland Hydro has spent $43.1 million to obtain 53 properties in the Netherdale and Dalrymple Heights areas.

Queensland Hydro chief executive Kieran Cusack told the ABC the acquisitions were about providing certainty to landholders.

“We opened it up to landholders that if they desired for us to purchase their property, that we would enter negotiations with them to do so,” he said. 

“Ultimately, a large number of those people that have sold to us are still living in their properties [through rental agreements].” 

But the acquisitions come ahead of the project’s business case being finalised towards the end of the year.

“We are currently methodically working through all of the elements that you would expect for a project of this scale and putting together the business case that we will submit to the government,” Mr Cusack said.

The Arnolds say they’re holding out from selling their property to Queensland Hydro at this stage.

They’ve been working on their eight-hectare property for close to two decades; they run a small hobby farm with a few cattle.

The state government initially told them it wanted to resume only part of their property for the project, but that has since changed to the whole property.

“That’s one of the things that we will be very sad about is if this does go ahead and we have to move, then all [the cattle] have to go and that makes me very sad,” Mrs Arnold said.

Their neighbours, Katrina and Richard Sempf, face a similar predicament.

“We originally bought it as a would-be retirement place,” Mr Sempf said.

“Next thing, you know, the government’s made this big announcement so we’ve had to put all our plans on hold.

What is pumped hydro?

Grattan Institute energy and climate change director Tony Wood said the production of hydro-electricity had “been around for many, many decades”, with the Snowy Mountain Hydro Scheme one of the country’s most prominent.

Pumped hydro takes dammed water and releases it to a lower dam or reservoir through a generator to make electricity. When energy demand is low, it pumps the water back up to the higher dam to repeat the process.

Mr Wood said the idea of using hydro as a storage option had been revived in more recent times.

“It’s quite simple in concept. The cost and technologies vary a lot depending on the geological and other local circumstances,” he said.

Mr Wood said storage was needed as major renewable energy sources like wind and solar only provided an intermittent supply of power.

Currently that consistent supply, or base-load power, is serviced by coal and gas.

“Hydro can, depending on the dam, run for quite a long time,” he said.

“But there is always a limit to how big a dam is … because if you’re going to build a really big dam, then there’s a lot of technical and cost issues associated with that.

The balance between development and its impacts was a characteristic of “quite frankly just about every significant development, not just energy”, he added.

Farmers left scratching their heads

That balance is at the forefront of minds for those impacted by pumped hydro projects in Queensland.

Wivenhoe Hydro Power Station west of Brisbane is Queensland’s only pumped hydro plant, but development is progressing on the Pioneer-Burdekin proposal as well as one at Borumba near Gympie, north of Brisbane.

Together, the Borumba and Pioneer-Burdekin projects have the potential to store up to seven gigawatts of electricity — enough to power all of Queensland for a day before needing to be recharged.

Environmentalists opposed to the projects estimate they will jointly take up 3,300 hectares of land, or roughly three times the size of Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne’s CBDs combined.

In June 2023, the Queensland government announced $6 billion in funding to progress the Borumba Pumped Hydro Project, with the total project cost estimated to be $14.2 billion.

Pending successful planning and environmental approvals, it is targeting first power in 2030.

“We have received the final investment decision for the Borumba project and it’s currently going through an environmental impact statement phase for our main works and exploratory works, and we’ve got some minor exploratory works that we have commenced using some state regulations,” Kieran Cusack said. 

Transmission lines and towers linking Borumba to the Woolooga solar farm will be 800 metres from Ernie Franz’s home.

The beef producer says his family has been farming land in the Manumbar area for more than a century.

“We don’t want the powerline here. It should have gone straight through the top of the forestry where it wasn’t going to impact on anyone,” Mr Franz said.

“You can’t take machinery over three metres high under it, you can’t use electric fences and it’s just an eyesore of the country.”

His sister-in-law Sheryl Franz said Queenslanders needed to know the impacts the project would have on landholders.

“People want their power when they want it,” she said.

Mr Franz says he has concerns about the project’s viability during drought conditions, which have affected the region heavily over the past decade.

“That Borumba Dam has been almost dry there a few times.

“They build the dam and raise the wall and it doesn’t rain, there’s no water for the hydro scheme.”

The cost of fighting climate change

The Queensland Conservation Council is stuck between a rock and a hard place — protecting the environment or responding to climate change.

“These are really big projects; we do have concerns around their environmental impact,” director Dave Copeman said.

“But at the same time, we know that one of the greatest threats to the animals and the plants that we love in Queensland is out-of-control climate change.

You don’t have to look far to find just how complex and costly pumped hydro projects are.

The Snowy 2.0 Pumped Storage project in New South Wales has been hit by delays and controversies.

The project is the largest renewable energy project under construction in Australia.

In May a partial tunnel collapse at the construction site made headlines after a blast broke through to an adjacent tunnel in the main transformer cavern. 

In Queensland, Kidston Pumped Storage Hydro is another example.

The project, 270 kilometres north-west of Townsville, is one of the first new hydro projects in Australia in 40 years.

It was due for completion in 2022 but hit a snag that December when excavation works resulted in water flooding a main underground access tunnel.

Genex chief executive Craig Francis said it led to a $15 million cost blowout and major delays, bringing the privately developed project to an eye-watering $790 million.

“There’s an entire industry that’s looking to leverage off the work that we’re doing to build more of these,” Mr Francis said.

By next year, the facility will generate enough electricity to power more than 100,000 homes for eight hours.

Unlike the proposed Borumba and Pioneer-Burdekin projects, Kidston already had two large water storages needed for pumped hydro in the form of disused gold mine reservoirs.

Mr Francis said that made the site purpose-built for the project.

“You won’t get a project like Kidston again which has two reservoirs as close to each other.”

‘Hydro good for Queensland’

Kieran Cusack said a study done by the government called the Queensland Hydro Study ultimately came to the conclusion Borumba and Pioneer-Burdekin were the “two best prospects” for pumped hydro storage in the state.

“In our opinion these projects are unquestionably good for Queensland; they are supporting the renewable energy transition,” he said.

“And so from our perspective, we are doing everything we can in our power to make sure that we are covering the community benefits, the environmental impacts, the social impacts and we are approaching these projects the right way.”

Mr Cusack said he understood discontent in the community, especially around the Pioneer-Burdekin community, and he wanted to be as open and transparent with them as possible.