A Planning Farce: How the WRL and VNI West Became Case Studies in Political Interference and Policy Failure
The Western Renewables Link (WRL) and its companion project, VNI West, have become emblems of a planning process in freefall, one increasingly shaped not by evidence or good governance, but by political imperatives and bureaucratic theatre.
It is no exaggeration to call this a monumental failure of energy planning in Victoria.
The rot begins with AEMO, which has shifted its stance on WRL with troubling inconsistency over successive Integrated System Plans (ISPs). In 2020, WRL was wrongly classified as “committed”, a designation that demanded full regulatory approval and social license, neither of which existed then or now. By 2022, the status had become more ambiguous, before finally being clarified in both the 2022 and 2024 ISPs: WRL is an “anticipated” project. In plain language, that means conditional, uncertain.
And yet, VicGrid, the government body tasked with strategic transmission planning, has flatly ignored this classification. In its draft 2025 Victorian Transmission Plan (VTP), WRL is treated as a baseline certainty, a “committed” input across all scenarios.
This isn’t just a bureaucratic oversight. It’s a direct contradiction of AEMO’s own framework and a fundamental breach of transparency obligations under the Australian Energy Regulator’s planning guidelines. The result is a strategic plan based not on possibility, but on a foregone conclusion, one that precludes meaningful scrutiny of alternatives and calls the integrity of the entire process into question.
Even more staggering is the shifting timeline. WRL was supposed to be operational by 2025. Then 2026. Then 2027. Now, as of June 30, 2025, AusNet has confirmed construction won’t even begin until early 2027, with completion not until late 2029. And on the same day the Environmental Effects Statement (EES) was released, it claimed construction would occur from 2026 to 2028. Hours later, AusNet admitted those dates were already out of date.
This is not just poor communication. It is misleading by omission.
The EES, a cornerstone of environmental transparency, was outdated at the moment of its release. Any assessment based on that timeline, from environmental impact to route justification, is now tainted by inaccuracy. That is a serious integrity breach that should not be glossed over.
Even more damning is VicGrid’s continued refusal to model any scenario in which WRL does not proceed or is delayed beyond 2028, despite ample evidence that both outcomes are now not only plausible, but probable. This artificial narrowing of the planning lens excludes consideration of viable alternatives, such as Plan B and the Syncline Community Cable, dismissed on the basis of timeframes that are now comparable or superior to WRL’s revised schedule.
The farce doesn’t end there. VNI West, the so-called “critical companion” to WRL, has also now been delayed to late 2030. These cascading delays across Victoria’s transmission rollout render the Draft VTP’s 2028 delivery assumptions untenable. And yet, the Plan clings to them like gospel.
This is not planning. This is political theatre masquerading as strategy.
Let’s be clear: WRL has never satisfied the criteria for a committed project. It has been reclassified, re-delayed, and now appears to be politically parked until after the 2026 Victorian state election. Meanwhile, landholders, councils and communities have been asked to accept irreversible outcomes based on deliberately outdated information and rubber-stamped timelines.
It is now impossible to view this process as anything other than a state-sanctioned dereliction of due diligence.
Let’s strip away the fiction: the Western Renewables Link has never primarily been about “unlocking renewables” in western Victoria. That’s the marketing line, not the engineering reality.
In AEMO’s 2018 Integrated System Plan, the projects now known as WRL and VNI West formed the southern leg of SnowyLink, a proposed interconnector linking Snowy 2.0 to Melbourne via central Victoria. That vision was later split into two stand-alone projects. The likely reason? As a single project, SnowyLink South may not have passed the cost–benefit test required under the RIT-T framework.
But by slicing it in two, planners could claim the same benefits twice across both parts and allow each section, of what is arguably a single project, to be seen as having a net benefit, by allowing the earlier project (WRL) to sink funds and generate artificial momentum for the second (VNI West). Had the two sections been assessed as a single project it’s highly unlikely that a net benefit compared to costs would have been calculated.
This concern is further validated by the fact that, on 20 February 2023, the Victorian Government issued a Ministerial Order under the National Electricity (Victoria) Act 2005 (NEVA) authorising AEMO to accelerate the VNI West project. This order effectively re-combined VNI West and WRL into a single undertaking — but in doing so, it stripped away the requirement to reapply the Regulatory Investment Test for Transmission (RIT-T). Under normal circumstances, the Australian Energy Regulator (AER) mandates a new RIT-T when there is a material change in circumstances, to ensure that major transmission projects still deliver a net economic benefit. The effect was clear: a core accountability mechanism was removed — and with it, the public’s only chance to test whether the combined project still made economic or strategic sense.
Half of SnowyLink South, then called KerangLink, now VNI West, was intended to strengthen the Victoria–NSW interconnection, but not until 2035, or earlier only if Yallourn Power Station retired ahead of schedule. In other words, even then, the case for early construction was tenuous at best.
This kind of regulatory sleight of hand fundamentally distorts infrastructure planning. What should be a rigorous investment test becomes a shell game, where projects are sliced, rebranded, and rushed through under the guise of urgency, while long-term costs and risks are buried from public view. It also explains why WRL is being treated as inevitable: once public money is sunk, political and financial lock-in follows. No matter how poor the planning, the show must go on.
So why is the WRL being forced through five years early?
According to AEMO’s 2019 PACR, the rationale for fast-tracking the Sydenham–Ballarat section was not urgent energy demand, but a fear that increasing urbanisation and land values would make the corridor harder to secure in future.
In other words: the current WRL route was chosen not for what it solves today, but because of what it might cost in 2035. That’s not energy planning. That’s speculative land banking by transmission planners.
And yet, this corridor is being rammed through farms, communities, and environmentally sensitive areas today, causing irreversible damage, for benefits that might not materialise for another decade or more, if ever. The entire rationale is anchored in the speculative future of VNI West, itself now delayed until 2030.
The truth is that WRL has become a sacrificial prequel to VNI West, not a standalone project justified on its own merits.
VicGrid, AEMO, and the Victorian Government have a lot to answer for. Their collective failure to uphold transparency, evidence-based planning, and genuine community engagement has brought us to this point: a massive infrastructure gamble anchored in fiction, not fact.
Victoria deserves better. So do the thousands of rural landholders being told to sacrifice their land, environment, and livelihoods for a transmission future whose timelines are fantasy and whose rationale is increasingly unravelling.
What’s truly frustrating is how often impacted communities are blamed for delays, as if local opposition is the root cause of dysfunction. Lobbyists, industry players, and governments love to shout “there’s no transition without transmission” while conveniently ignoring the shambolic planning that got us here.
Instead of taking responsibility, they toss around condescending “incentives” to buy communities off, as if trust and fairness can be patched over with handouts.
It’s time policymakers and planners stopped deflecting blame and acknowledged a hard truth: the real source of delay and dysfunction lies within their own processes. The finger-pointing at communities needs to stop. The real blockage isn’t opposition, it’s the deeply flawed system driving these projects forward.