The Draft Victorian Transmission Plan (VTP) and a looming Environmental Effects Statement (EES) process are being used to force through the Western Renewables Link – without transparency, without alternatives, and without community consent.

The deadline to respond to the Draft VTP is late June. Our voices must be hear and we demand accountability. We want to ensure we get as many submissions is as possible.

Join us for a critical community meeting where we will unpack the Draft VTP, explain what’s at stake, and help you prepare a powerful submission.

Date: Monday, June 23
Time: 7:00 PM
Location: Myrniong Hall, 6 Short Street, Myrniong
Tea and coffee provided

This isn’t just an update it’s a stand.

Show up, speak out, and help Stop Labor’s Towers. Our land, our communities, and our future depend on it.

EES: If the EES becomes a tool to rubber-stamp destruction, we will meet it with unrelenting legal and grassroots resistance.

VTP: Vic Grid’s campaign of coercion must end – united, we will not be bought, broken, or bullied.

The Draft 2025 Victorian Transmission Plan (VTP) is not a blueprint for a secure, sustainable energy future. It is a thinly veiled justification for the Western Renewables Link (WRL), a broken project forced on regional communities with no proper analysis, no transparency, and no consent.

Despite AEMO classifying WRL as merely “anticipated,” the VTP treats it as inevitable. There is no modelling of alternatives, no cost-benefit analysis, and no acknowledgement of the immense risks to farmland, bushfire zones, cultural heritage, and human health. The VTP blatantly ignores the VicGrid Act’s requirement to assess social licence, environmental impact, and community-supported alternatives.

This is not planning. It is political theatre designed to rubber-stamp outdated projects that serve the few at the expense of the many.

We have one narrow window to stop this. The VTP is open for public comment until 24 June. Every single submission matters.

Now is the time to:

• Expose the VTP’s failures its refusal to analyse alternatives, its blind support for the WRL, its erasure of regional voices.
• Demand a genuine review of the social, economic, and environmental risks of the WRL.
• Call for the inclusion of Syncline—a shovel-ready, underground HVDC alternative that follows existing corridors, protects farmland, avoids bushfire zones, and actually reflects international best practice.

Syncline is costed. It’s backed by experts. It has the support of the very communities this plan ignores. And yet it has been shut out of the conversation. That’s not a technical oversight. It’s a deliberate political decision.

This is our chance to force the government to listen. To stop a disastrous project before it begins. To replace destruction with smarter, safer solutions.

Make a submission. Demand better. Because the WRL will never be built not here, not like this, not with our consent.
Let the VTP be the turning point. Not a plan for transmission, but a call to arms.

👉 Submit now: [Insert VTP submission link] 🕛 Closes 24 June 2025.

Submit your response here: https://engage.vic.gov.au/project/victransmissionplan/survey/5817

Read the full Energy Grid Alliance response: https://www.energygridalliance.com.au/critical-analysis-of-the-draft-2025-victorian-transmission-plan/

Learn more about Syncline: https://www.synclinecommunitycable.com.au

The Draft Victorian Transmission Plan (VTP), cloaked in the language of policy neutrality, is in fact an act of state-sanctioned deception. It arrives not as a genuine roadmap for a renewable future, but as a calculated political manoeuvre to bulldoze community resistance and institutionalise the deeply discredited Western Renewables Link (WRL).

At its heart, the document is not just flawed it is dangerous. Its omissions are not oversights. They are strategic erasures. The classification of the WRL as a “committed project” is more than a bureaucratic sleight of hand; it is a fundamental misrepresentation of fact. There is no completed Environmental Effects Statement. No final planning approvals. No community consent. Under the National Electricity Rules, the WRL fails every test of what constitutes a committed project. And yet, in the VTP, it is treated as inevitability.

This is not policy-making. This is a coronation of an agenda already written, in the backrooms of industry, signed off by departments more committed to inertia than integrity.

We have seen this before a quiet bypassing of accountability, wrapped in the euphemisms of consultation. The cost? A $20 billion-plus transmission build-out that not only threatens to double household energy bills across Victoria but obliterates any remaining trust between government and the regions it purports to represent.

This is not merely a failure of infrastructure planning. It is a collapse of public confidence. The social licence for this project does not exist. The economic rationale cannot be substantiated. And the environmental risks, particularly in fire-prone zones like those carved out by the WRL’s corridor remain unanswered and unconscionable.

Every energy expert we have consulted; engineers, planners, economists agrees: the Draft VTP cannot withstand serious scrutiny. VicGrid’s modelling is a closed book, its assumptions bloated, its process unanchored from both good planning and good governance.

The WRL has become a symbol. Not of progress, but of everything that corrodes public life: opacity, arrogance, and abandonment of those outside the city’s margins. This is not the energy future Victoria deserves. It is a future built on force, not consent.

Call to Action

There is still time. The Draft VTP is open for comment until 24 June. We urge every community member, every community group, every voice that has been sidelined to speak now. Submit. Object. Demand that the WRL be struck from the record until it meets the standards of legality, transparency, and public accountability.

This is a moment not to whisper, but to roar. The line has been drawn. Either planning in Victoria serves its people or it serves something else entirely.

The Australian Financial Review article titled “Victoria’s green grid cost understated by $16b” (2 June 2025) reveals that the true cost of upgrading Victoria’s transmission network to support renewable energy is projected to be more than $20 billion, significantly higher than the $4.3 billion figure released in VicGrid’s 2025 Draft Victorian Transmission Plan (VTP). Experts, including Professor Bruce Mountain of the Victoria Energy Policy Centre, argue that the VTP failed to factor in key cost drivers such as inflation, financing, and depreciation, resulting in an understatement of real economic impacts. Notably, major transmission projects like the Western Renewables Link (WRL), VNI West, and Marinus Link were excluded from the original VTP estimate, with new modelling showing these could add an extra $16 billion to the total cost.

The article provides critical context for growing opposition to the WRL, as it exposes both the economic flaws and transparency failings of VicGrid’s transmission strategy. While the State Government frames the WRL as a necessary investment to secure energy supply and meet net-zero targets, mounting evidence suggests that costs are being concealed and underestimated. The revelations come as the government pushes forward with its infrastructure agenda despite unresolved community concerns, legal uncertainties, and rising financial risks prompting urgent calls for accountability, more accurate modelling, and genuine consideration of lower-impact alternatives like the Syncline Community Cable.