One of Australia’s most loved TV celebrities, Catriona Rowntree, is battling the state government over plans to build a lithium battery storage facility in the land adjacent to her Victorian home.
The long-serving Channel 9 Getaway host, who lives in Little River – a region in between Melbourne and Geelong – said the Sandy Creek Road property in which the renewables energy project will be located is in a ‘fire corridor’ that poses a substantial safety risk to the region.
Rowntree, speaking to ABC Melbourne radio host Rafael Epstein, also took exception with the “secretive” nature of the project, which she claims even the local Geelong council was not aware of.
“Thank god for local papers (in his case, the Geelong Advertiser). We read that our neighbour is trying to push through one of Victoria’s biggest lithium battery farms,” she said.
“This sits at the base of the You Yangs Regional Park. We’re in a high fire zone and the government has actually placed a significant landscape overlay on this very farm. This is the exact same farm where the historic 1969 fires broke out, we get fires in this area all of the time. Yesterday we had 100 kilometres winds sweeping through this area.
“The State Government is trying to sneak this through and the council did not know.”
Rowntree said that she contacted a local councillor after reading about the project and they were unaware of the plans.
She also said the farm serves as a koala corridor and the neighbouring You Yangs Regional Park has “wildlife everybody loves” that would be threatened by the renewables project.
She stressed she is not against renewable energy projects and that it was “not a case of ‘not in our back yard’”, but the location for this site was a clear safety concern.
Rowntree said that nearby there is a disused sand quarry that would be more suitable to host the battery farm.
She said the plans were “a joke” and “shady as ever”, adding: “If you move this project a little bit further up the road there is already a completely disused mine, why wouldn’t you try to re-generate that land?”
B&T has approached the Victorian Government for comment.
