Show Me The Perks Podcast | Land for Renewable Energy with Sam Richardson

Kim Bigg

G’day everyone and welcome to the first show of Show Me the Perks for 2025. I’m here today with Sam Richardson from Cowell Clarke. So just to provide a bit of background to Sam, Sam is a director at Cowell Clarke Commercial Lawyers, national law firm with offices in Adelaide and Sydney. Sam is from the Adelaide office and Sam is the co-head of Cowell Clarke’s agribusiness team.

Sam specialises in agribusiness sales and acquisitions, natural capital and renewable energy projects. And we’re really pleased to have Sam with us here today. Welcome Sam. Thanks Kim. Good to be with you. Excellent. And what I’m going to do now is just ask Sam to provide a bit of background on himself and his career to give all the listeners a little bit more of an insight of what his career background is.

Sam Richardson

Yeah, thanks Kim. Well initially I started out as a property and agribusiness lawyer after finishing up at Adelaide University about 20 years ago now, time flies. And in the agribusiness space, I guess, leveraging off that property background, I’ve worked with farming clients for that period of time. My family has a farming background, so it was a bit of a natural fit to work in that space and advise clients in the agribusiness space. And as you alluded to in the intro, initially that was in the transactional space, assisting farming clients with buying or selling farming land. And that is still a big part of what I do, but perhaps the reason why we’re talking today, in more recent times, that’s branched into the renewable energy space, which it’s really enjoyable space to advise clients in that area. There’s a lot going on and we might unpack a little bit of it over the next 20 minutes or so.

Kim Bigg

So, we’re just going to dive into it now. So, Sam’s obviously had a background in advising farmers and landholders, but in particular, what we’re talking about today is advising on renewable energy projects. And I think we’ve all had experiences, or many advisors would have experiences of discussing with clients who’ve been approached, know, farmers or landholders being approached by energy companies or otherwise, and trying to understand you know, what these contracts are, they get thrust in front of them and all the discussions that happen can be bewildering to people. So, perhaps if I can just give, I’ll give the microphone to Sam now just to explain perhaps how we got into this and what’s changed over the last 10 years in this space, particularly in South Australia.

Sam Richarson
Yeah, well, as I said, the background was advising farming clients already and then really it all started in the renewable space around about 10 years ago. I got a call from a pastoralist up in the northern areas of South Australia on a large cattle station up there. I actually went to the school with the son and anyway I was speaking with the son and also his father and they said they’d been approached by a very large renewable energy company out of California in the States.

and they wanted to build a $650 million solar thermal renewable energy plant on their station, which at the time was proposed to be one of the largest solar thermal projects in the world.

Kim Bigg
They probably didn’t know what solar thermal was being out there in South Australia.

Sam Richarson
Well, both them and me as well at the time. It is a complex area when you get into the nitty-gritty of the sort of specifics. and they said at the time, look, the government’s been sort of involved, but we really don’t know what what’s going on. And they said, can you help us out with these legal documents that have come across their desk? And I said to them, and I was frank with them, said, look, at that point in time, there wasn’t really a large renewable energy sector. And I said, I don’t know a huge amount about renewables. But what I did say is, you know, I act for farming clients.

I’ve got a property background and they’re certainly going to need some sort of land tenure agreement with you, perhaps an option, possibly even a long-term lease agreement. So, I said, I think I might be able to help you out. And that’s really where it all started with that about 10 years ago, without going into too much detail on that project, client confidentiality, of course, but the client did relatively well out of that deal.

The projects morphed into something different today, which is not uncommon with these projects. And I’m still helping the client some 10 years later.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, lots changed over the to go back to your question about what’s changed. Certainly, quite a lot has changed Kim over the last 10 years. The market has matured quite a lot. We’re now seeing a lot of proponents actively targeting farmers and landholders. I’m sure lots of people would know of a client or a farmer who has been approached.

Kim Bigg

So just jumping onto a slight diversion, if we jump into the renewable energy market in South Australia and Australia, can you describe some of the listeners, just describe what it is that is the renewable energy market? I think sometimes you hear of these…

know, projects where people come to us and talk, come to a farmer or otherwise, but no one really knows what the targets are for the overall Australia. What are we aiming for? You know, these 2030 guides and things like that. What are we aiming for? Why are these projects going to continue to be knocking on people’s door?

So, Sam, perhaps you could just describe for us the current renewable energy market in South Australia and Australia, and in particular what are the clean energy targets? I think we all have farming clients who continue to get targeted and approached by these energy companies so it would be interesting to know more broadly what the program is?

Sam Richardson

It’s a good question. So, I guess perhaps starting at the federal level, the federal government has a target of 82 % of Australia’s power from renewable energy sources by 2030. Yeah, yeah. So very, very short timeframe. That target’s been in place for a while. There’s certainly going to be some challenges in the federal government getting to that target. I think most people in industry

have now come to the realisation that that target is not going to be met. Despite that, the federal government is still doing everything they can. We’re currently at about 40 % and it does vary quite wildly from state to state, and it also varies depending on the time of the year. So naturally, during summer, the sun is shining a lot more, so the solar resource is there. Whereas during the middle of winter, that resource is not as reliable.

Kim Bigg

While there’s still that targeting plane, these people are still going to be targeting it and everyone’s chasing 82%. However, while that dream may be.

Sam Richardson

Yeah, absolutely. And look, there’s certainly been progress that’s been made. The Eastern seaboard in particular is coming off a low base there. Coal and gas stations have been phased out and they’re playing catch up. And you’ve had other jurisdictions Tasmania, course, with hydro and South Australia here, where we’ve been above the curve when it comes to renewable energy. Looking at South Australia, for example, currently around 75 % of our power comes from renewables. But we have had instances, and it’s been reported recently, where we’ve had days where we’ve had over 100%. And we’re actually generating all of our power from renewables. And we’re sending some over to Victoria.

So, there’s a lot of variation, but I guess with those targets in mind, what it really means is there’s a lot of demand for farming land. You can’t put these projects up in the suburbs. So yeah, there’s a lot of demand, a lot of approaches to the farming sector, which presents, I guess, both an opportunity, but also a need to carefully scrutinise the proposed terms of the deal.

Kim Bigg

Yeah, and that’s exactly right. And clients of Perks, clients of Cowell Clarke, are inevitably small, business owners and farmers and landholders. And they’re looking to people like yourselves and ourselves, for advice when they’re getting these approaches and trying to work out what to do. And today’s podcast is hopefully going to shine a bit of a light on that, just to give people a bit of an impression of what’s out there and what’s happening and what they can do if they get approached. Now, can you describe briefly? as briefly as possible for these types of things because they’re complex. But renewable energy projects, just describing lay persons’ terms, what happens? Someone’s approaching them about a renewable energy project. What are they trying to achieve? What are these projects trying to achieve?

Sam Richardson

Yeah, well, I’ll keep this fairly concise as a lawyer, not a scientist or an engineer. But effectively, we’re talking about using natural resources to generate electricity to power the grid.

So, the key three main ones that the listeners would perhaps be aware of are solar. That’s where we’re using the sun, PV panels or cells to convert that solar energy from the sun into electrical energy. So we’re all aware of rooftop solar. That’s been a very successful scheme in Australia for many, many years now. We’re effectively looking at that on a large scale basis, massive areas of land subject to solar panels.

So that’s solar. Wind, we’re looking to convert wind to energy. So, to do that, we have these massive wind turbines, and I don’t know, Kim, whether you’ve seen one of these out in the field, but we’re talking around potentially 200 metres high, potentially even bigger with the new turbines these days, blades that are around 60 to 70 metres as well. They’re massive structures. A lot of concrete to put things in the ground. might touch on that a bit later. And they use the kinetic energy from rotating those large wind turbines and use a generator to convert that into electrical energy.

Kim Bigg
And in those cases, often they’re continuing to, farmers continue to have grazing and otherwise happen whilst the wind turbines are there.

Sam Richardson
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And that’s one of the perhaps differences between wind versus solar or battery is the other option where usually you’re talking about an area that sort of is quadrant off for the solar or the battery, whereas wind, we’re trying to have a little bit more of integration once constructions complete. So yeah, final one being battery, which can operate as standalone, but usually what we see is that integrated with solar or wind to act as an ability when we’re not generating solar, when the sun’s not shining, or we’re not able to generate from the wind turbines because we’ve got a low wind resource.

Kim Bigg

they work in unison to say during the day you’ll produce a lot of solar. If all that solar electricity can’t be used, it’ll pump it into a battery and then to some extent overnight it can then be fed out into the grid and used on an overnight basis to try to extend the usage of either wind or solar and make it a bit more 24 hour rather than sporadic through the day.

Sam Richardson

Yeah, and that’s the issue that we find with renewable resources compared with coal and gas is it’s intermittent. So that’s where battery plays a big role. Battery technology, I expect over the next five to 10 years, we’ll see significant advancements. We’ve really sort of reached a plateau with solar, but battery is still like the batteries at your home. If you’ve got your solar panels on your home, we’re still seeing some real growth in that area from a technological point of view going forward.

Kim Bigg

Excellent. Moving on to another area so coming back to what small business owners would be coming across here, have farmers and landholders who are being approached. Can you give me an idea of who’s likely to approach those farmers? They’re driving up the one kilometre driveway or something along these lines, who’s coming out of the Ute and who’s having a chat to them? Are these from the energy companies or someone else? You can describe who they are generally.

Yeah, yeah. Look, usually it will be from the energy company themselves. There are some instances where they will engage in intermediary, but a lot of them, particularly the larger ones, will have what they call land tenure managers or something similar. And their role is to facilitate that discussion with the farmer or the landholder. It’s a very complicated process and documentation that spits out if a deal can be reached and that’s the job of the land tenure manager to coordinate with the farmer or the landholder.

Kim Bigg
So why do they select certain people? You mentioned, is this purely about tying up, tying together a bunch of land together to try to get a big enough space that makes projects worthwhile? Why don’t they go down one person’s driveway and sell the next?

Sam Richardson

Yeah, it’s a really good question. It sort of depends on which project we’re looking at. So if we talk wind for example. They are large scale projects. They need massive scale. We’re talking projects north of $500 million. And it’s highly unlikely that you’ll have, it’s possible, but it’s highly unlikely you’ll have just one landholder. So often you will need to, the energy company will need to consult and approach multiple landholders.

Yeah, absolutely. They need enough land to put the right turbines in the right area. whether it’s wind on a large scale or solar battery, potentially on a smaller scale, all of the renewable energy developers will do their initial feasibility, desktop analysis before they go out there and approach farmers. So this is what I talked about earlier about the market maturing. This is one area where renewable energy developers becoming far more sophisticated. They can use that mapping, they can use that data now in a way that they’ll approach a farmer for a specific reason. Those reasons can be different. It might be proximity to existing transmission lines. So, the developer doesn’t want to have to build out transmission lines, cost them a lot of money. So, if you’re close to an existing transmission line or a substation as a farmer, you’re preferred. Other reasons, obviously, the topography of the land is critical, not just for wind, but also solar. So again, they’ll be doing their analysis about where those areas are best for their project and then who they want to approach.

Kim Bigg

And if you were, and let’s say this person is one of our clients or if any of our listeners have been approached, and let’s say the next thing they do is they contact Sam and say, g’day Sam, I’ve been approached by this person, what should I ask for or what should I do next? What sort of things should the individual ask for? Are they allowed to ask for who they’re dealing with, what the name of the company is? Are they allowed to see an information memorandum? Ultimately, obviously the farmers trying to achieve, trying to understand what is this thing going to look like if I do actually sign up to it? What should they be asking for if you if they were ringing you and asking you what they should do next?

Sam Richardson
Yeah, there’s a few things. And I guess the first thing is if they’ve rung me or the lawyer or their accountant, that’s a good sign. You know, they are complex documents. Naturally, I would recommend that farmers and landholders pause, take a deep breath, speak to their accountant. That’s always a really good starting point to just understand, don’t be pressured into some of the renewable energy developers and not all of them, some of them are really good, but some of them will apply a lot of pressure and farming clients are not used to that. They’re not used to those sort of tactics. So yeah, the first thing would be to take a deep breath and seek that advice because obviously if formal documents are signed, it may be difficult to unravel and unwind that.

Kim Bigg
What are some of the things that you look for when you’re looking at those contracts in terms of, what are you trying to find out when you have a look at the length of the tenure and those types of things? What are you looking for?

Sam Richardson

Yeah, without getting into the nitty gritty of the legal aspects, but you’re certainly just starting at a high level. These are long-term deals. So, we could be talking 10 years for an option and a lease term, including renewals of another 70 years. So, we could be talking 80 years all up. So, this is potential intergenerational impacts for farmers that may have worked really hard over numerous generations to build up their farming portfolio, been really successful. And I would recommend to clients to… As I say, take that deep breath, make sure that they’re considering the impacts over the long term. The other perhaps initially comment I would make is these documents are prepared by the renewable energy developers. So, my role is to act for farmers and landholders in reviewing those documents. I don’t prepare the documents. So naturally they are tailored to the renewable energy developer for everything they want in the document.

So just with that background of the long-term nature, the complexity and perhaps the documents being a little bit one sided, then you can get into the specifics after that. But I think that’s the important context to start off.

Kim Bigg

You should almost start with a level of caution, they’ve approached you so, like most things in life, people are going to word it in your favour. No to say they are all trying to pull one over them but  ultimately get your contracts checked, read through these things, because as you say, they’re complex documents and they can have long-term aspects like 80-year terms. If that’s what it is, then at least know that that’s what it is and understand that there are intergenerational concepts to think about here. It’s going to affect not just the current generation, but the next one as well.

Sam Richardson

Yeah, absolutely. look, there’s good opportunity for farming clients as well. It can provide a stable source of revenue and income, particularly during drought times. So, there’s absolutely opportunities here to consider for farmers. So, there’s both the opportunity, but from the legal perspective, yeah, important to look through those documents.

Kim Bigg

That’s a good point. I’m probably mentioning all the items of caution and things to watch out for, but ultimately, we shouldn’t just look at the negatives of these things. We should look at the positives, which is, you know, can get quite a good financial outcome. We are going through bit of drought at the moment in South Australia and some level of financial security which continues to pay regardless of drought can actually be quite helpful to farmers to just mitigate the effects of these droughts. So perhaps just take us through that briefly, know, in terms of what type of financial outcomes can farmers and landholders get from these things? you know, obviously not holding into it, but generically, what have you seen in the past?

Sam Richardson

Yeah, look, it does vary wildly from project to project. And going back to the comments earlier about some farmers might be in a better position than others because they’re closer to a transmission line or the topography of their land is more suitable than their neighbour. So, it is a bit horses for courses. There are broad sort of parameters for what the financial returns might be with respect to an amount per annum per megawatt of wind turbine or per hectare of solar. But again, I caution a little bit that it varies from project to project. Perhaps what I think is perhaps a little bit more important is more around the devil in the detail about when those payments kick in, when they might cease. So, often a renewable energy proponent might provide to a client a term sheet with a headline amount, which may well look very attractive. But then you look through the documentation and then it becomes a little bit more apparent that perhaps a payment that a client may have thought would be made for the entire term of the option or the entire term of the lease is only made during certain periods. Or there’s a scale back lower payment until the facility’s up and running, which is very common. So, I tend to advise clients by all means, look at the headline amount and we can help clients with perhaps what they

Kim Bigg

Is it fair, is it reasonable, are they around the mark, you know, pay $500 a year for something that should be being paid, you know, five grand a year for or something like that.

Sam Richardson

Yeah, and we can help clients with all of that, but also the need to look at, yeah, the specifics about when those payments start and finish.

Kim Bigg
Fantastic. And what happens if the father or landowner doesn’t want to participate in the project? There are all sorts of things that can come to mind for these people, you know, they’re thinking through social costs, their visual outcomes, you know, there can be all sorts of reasons why people may not want to participate in a project. What are the sorts of options people have? You know, can they be forced to participate? What sort of options are available to landowners when they approach if they don’t want to participate?

Sam Richardson
Yeah, yeah, that’s a very good question and perhaps quite topical, because we have had some recent legislative changes in many jurisdictions, including in South Australia. So, I guess the starting point, if it’s freehold land, then the general proposition is that a farmer should be able to negotiate or reject a project as it wishes. There’s a little caveat to that if it’s a project of state significance in the legislation, which we currently don’t know what that means. Legislation only came out last year. So that’ll be interesting to see what evolves in that space in South Australia. On pastoral or perpetual land, so not freehold land, the regime is often quite different across most jurisdictions in Australia. Again, in South Australia, there’s been recent legislative change in that respect. And without going into the details for each and every state, landholders and farmers do need to be aware that the situation can often be quite different for pastoral perpetual land. that’s so pastoral perpetual land is land that is owned by the state government and they grant a long-term leasehold interest. And in various jurisdictions, in various parts of those states. So in the northern part of South Australia or the western part of New South Wales, it’ll be potentially pastoral or perpetual land rather than freehold land.

Kim Bigg
Excellent. And just to offer an example, I’m going to suggest that quite often what happens is after these people approach seed farmer, they drive down the road and probably… know, talk to the next door neighbour and have a chat and inevitably everyone has a chat to see what’s going on around the place and who else has been approached and who might be in on the project or not. Is, there advantages in farmers and landowners being together to try to gain advantage or what can they do to perhaps, you know.

better their position if you like by having a chat to additional farmers around the district and trying to work in unison with handling these, the developers as they approach them.

Sam Richardson
Yeah, absolutely. I guess the starting point is to check what documents may have been signed. Often renewable energy developers will seek to sign up a farmer or landholder to a confidentiality agreement, which may impose some restrictions on that.

But putting that to one side, if there is no confidentiality agreement, then yes, and I would obviously recommend clients don’t sign a confidentiality agreement. But yes, there’s certainly benefits in landholders and farmers communicating with each other, banding together if there’s no restriction on doing so. Also just to, broadly understand what might be going on what those discussions might be. Different farmers have different perspectives and different things that impact on them. But broadly speaking, and this is where often we will assist clients acting for multiple landholders or farmers, because ultimately, yes, often you’ll get much better bargaining power working together. And you may also get better efficiency with allocation of professional services costs, which.

Kim Bigg
So, you’ve got six farmers all approached with a similar document, you can send them through to a professional and they can review it sort of in unison rather than case by case.

Sam Richardson
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And often the renewable energy provider will make a contribution to professional service provider costs. I think that’s important that listeners know that. And that would allow them to see their accountant and see their lawyer and have the documents reviewed. But yes, often that process can be more efficient if there’s one lawyer or one accountant, one professional service provider assisting the group.

Kim Bigg
And what sort of, are there any options for people to take a revenue stake in the project and things like that? Some landowners might think, well, can we band together and rather than take a financial dollar sum, can we take a stake in a future development of it, seeing as the solar power or wind power is going to be stationed on their land, maybe they want to look at an option like that. Is that something that developers are open to or in your experience?

Sam Richardson
Yeah, we’re starting to see a little bit of that in the market. I talked about earlier about the market maturing. That’s one area where we’re seeing developers.

look towards what I would say treating the landholder or the farmer really as a true participant, a true almost joint venture stakeholder in the project rather than just what do need to pay them to get access to their land to put the project up.

Kim Bigg

Which hopefully can get better outcomes in terms of community engagement and give them social licence to come and do the project if you’ve got farmers and landholders on the side for more than just a transaction basis.

Sam Richardson

Yeah, and that’s one area where we’re seeing again a lot of changes on that social licence around. Also, farmers being very cautious about impacts on neighbouring landholders who may not be part of the project. Obviously, there’s going to be a limit where the project starts and ends.

And a lot of these farmers have got long standing relationships with their neighbours over many generations. And if they find out that their neighbour is not part of the project, perhaps their land is not as suitable, or the neighbour didn’t want to be part of the project. They also want to make sure that their neighbour is not aggrieved.

A lot of the larger projects, particularly with wind, we’re looking at mechanisms where adjacent landholders who may not have infrastructure on their land, whether by choice or as a result of the developer, are still receiving some sort of compensation as part of the project. So that’s really moving along in recent times. And I think that’s a good thing to see that. The other part of the social licence aspect is benefits for the community.

So the developer paying an amount of money that gets tipped into the local netball club or get tipped into the footy club or to help fix up the local hospital. Those type of things which it may not be a direct benefit for the landowner who is hosting the infrastructure, but they might say, I want you to do this for the community. And again.

Yeah, there’s a lot of these areas that are struggling and the project might be a way that can help give the community a boost.

Kim Bigg
So just going to summarise things a little bit for the listeners. Probably my take on this is there is an 82 % renewable energy target across Australia and South Australia may well be a long way advanced, maybe 75 % or something equivalent.

We’ve got five, the Australian network, if you like, has got five years to come up with 82%, and it’s currently sitting at about 40%. So, there’s a lot of money, even if they get halfway to the 82 % or 60 % or 70%, there’s still going to be a lot of money spent in this area to try to achieve this renewable energy target. We’re going to mature in market. It’s getting bigger and bigger. And I think…

you know, these sorts of approaches from energy companies is going to continue to happen. So perhaps I can throw it to Sam to give a bit of a summary of where he thinks this market is going to go and perhaps…

Yeah, I guess just a bit of a summary of where’s the market going to go and if you were advising or if you had any message perhaps, it’s probably better I put a message for farmers and landholders that are out there who are going to get approached by these, what should they be thinking about or what would your message be to them?

Sam Richardson
Yeah, well, I guess just starting with that first aspect, as you say, I agree with your comments. There’s a lot to go to get to those targets, the federal and the respective state governments are moving in that direction. Even if we had a change at the federal level, I don’t see a massive change. We’ve come this far down the renewal path. It’s almost like we’re half pregnant and it’s hard to get out of that. So, I expect that to continue. read a report the other day about $1.9 billion or trillion dollars, rather, worth of capital that needs to be spent into the sector to get to that 82%. It’s a staggering amount of money. And that’s offshore capital. That’s government through the clean energy regulator.

Kim Bigg
And so even if you got halfway there, you’ve still got one trillion dollars is going to be spent on this area to try to get as close as possible, which is enormous.

Sam Richardson
I think because of that, I expect things to continue along those lines. We’re seeing a lot of the larger corporates to meet their emissions requirements look at these type of projects where they take off-take agreements. So, we’ve got the corporate sector now playing a greater role than ever and again I expect that to continue. So, we’ve got government, we’ve got offshore investment and we’ve got large Australian corporates and that’s why I think we still got a lot to play out in this sector going forward.

Kim Bigg
Probably all three working in unison to some extent in some of these really large projects, having offshore and local and government support trying to make them say it, which is probably a good example of what happens, I’m sure. Any message for landholders and farmers?

Sam Richardson
Yeah, well, look, think my message would be to them, as I said earlier, is to take that deep breath when you get those documents. Just be cognisant of the fact that there’s some good opportunities, some great opportunities. But we are talking about complicated documents. So, yeah have a chat with your accountant, engage your specialist lawyer that works in this space and use your advisers to help you get a fair deal because ultimately that’s what I think as advisers we’re trying to do is to help farmers and landowners make sure that they’re getting a fair outcome too.

That’s a really good summary. Thanks again for your time, Sam. We’ll wrap it up there. But that’s,
Kim Bigg
I hope, given our listeners a good example of what is happening in the energy market overall. And also, that’s a little indication of if farmers and landholders are getting approached, what they can do, strongly encourage them to reach out to their accountant or lawyer and, as Sam says, make sure they get a fair deal for themselves, for the here and now as well as for future generations. So, thank you to Sam for coming along. Really appreciate you giving us an insight into this area. And we look forward to chatting with listeners again next month on the next episode of Show Me the Perks. Thanks Sam.

Sam Richardson
Thanks Kim, thanks for having me.