The Turnbull government has appointed an academic and company director with strong ties to climate and renewables research as its new “wind commissioner”, in a move the clean energy industry says should help return the wind energy debate to “sensible”.

Andrew Dyer serves on the boards of Climateworks Australia and the Monash University sustainability unit. The government says his primary role will be to “refer complaints about windfarms to relevant state authorities” – which are already responsible for dealing with them.



The wind commissioner was promised by the former prime minister Tony Abbott in response to a Coalition and crossbench-dominated Senate committee report into the alleged health effects of windfarms. The senators demanded moves against wind energy in return for their essential votes on changes to the renewable energy target, which went beyond the deal the government had struck with Labor.



The Clean Energy Council’s chief executive, Kane Thornton, said he hoped Dyer’s appointment – and appointments to a new scientific committee on wind – would “return a more sensible tone to the debate, which had entered some strange territory during the recent Senate inquiry into windfarms.

“We expect that these new appointments will help to blow away some of the conspiracy theories about windfarms that have been championed by a small number of federal senators over the last few years.”



Dyer serves on multiple boards including Climateworks – a body that aims to facilitate substantial reductions in Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions over the next five years – and the Monash University sustainability institute. The institute brings together academics from all disciplines to tackle “climate change and sustainability, and their intrinsic multiple crises”, as well as the question of how the Australian economy can become carbon neutral.

He has also served on the board of solar thermal company Brightsource Energy and was a consultant with McKinsey.

Dyer will sit in Hunt’s federal environment department. His role does not appear to involve determining the veracity of any complaints but rather passing them on to the state authorities and collating scientific information.

When Abbott pledged to appoint a wind commissioner, he told the radio announcer Alan Jones he found windfarms visually awful, agreed that they might have “potential health impacts” and said the deal on the renewable energy target was designed to reduce their numbers as much as the current Senate would allow.

“What we did recently in the Senate was to reduce, Alan, capital R-E-D-U-C-E, the number of these things that we are going to get in the future … I frankly would have liked to have reduced the number a lot more but we got the best deal we could out of the Senate and if we hadn’t had a deal, Alan, we would have been stuck with even more of these things …

“What we are managing to do through this admittedly imperfect deal with the Senate is to reduce the growth rate of this particular sector as much as the current Senate would allow us to do.”

He added: “I do take your point about the potential health impact of these things … when I’ve been up close to these windfarms not only are they visually awful but they make a lot of noise.”

Announcing the new commissioner, Hunt said: “The negotiated settlement of the renewable energy target in mid 2015 is expected to lead to increased construction of wind turbines in the next five years.

“The commissioner will refer complaints about windfarms to relevant state authorities and help ensure that they are properly addressed. The commissioner will work with stakeholders to identify needs and priorities for monitoring windfarms [but would not] seek to duplicate or override the important statutory responsibilities of other jurisdictions.”

Dyer will provide an annual report to parliament and draw on the work of a new independent scientific committee on wind turbines. He, and the new committee, will serve for three years, after which the positions will be reviewed.

The membership of the scientific committee has also been announced. It will be chaired by John Davy, an adjunct professor at RMIT.

Members of the Association of Australian Acoustic Consultants told an inquiry into wind turbines that several studies had found no perceivable physical reaction to so-called infrasound from windfarms, as claimed by some residents living close to them.

In a report released in February the National Health and Medical Research Council also concluded that “there is currently no consistent evidence that windfarms cause adverse health effects in humans”.

The Australian Conservation Foundation’s chief executive, Kelly O’Shanassy, said it was “sad to see the federal government continuing to contribute uncertainty to Australia’s burgeoning clean energy industry.

“There have been no less than eight studies conducted at the federal level in the last five years into wind energy and every single one has found no evidence of wind farms making people sick.”

Friends of the Earth said the appointment of a wind commissioner was “the stuff of satire”.

The national coordinator of the Australian Wind Alliance, Andrew Bray, said it was unclear where the Turnbull government stood on renewables in Australia.

“On the one hand you have environment minister Greg Hunt insisting that this new government is ‘rock solid’ on renewables, but today he is out there appointing an unnecessary commissioner and committee – wasting time and money,” he said.

