The scale is the reason any of this exists. Under the NSW Electricity Infrastructure Roadmap the Central-West Orana zone is the state's first renewable energy zone, and the transmission project alone accounts for 240 km of transmission lines, 2 energy hubs, 9 switching stations, 2 temporary accommodation camps and up to 1,800 temporary workers.
In April 2025 EnergyCo appointed ACEREZ, a partnership comprised of ACCIONA, COBRA
and Endeavour Energy
to design, build, finance, operate and maintain the
Central-West Orana REZ transmission infrastructure for 35 years
. Thirty-five years is
longer than most people will live in the house they are in now.
What a Social Impact Management Plan is for
A social impact assessment was required as part of planning approval. The plan that
followed, published in summary form in June 2025, outlines how EnergyCo and network
operator, ACEREZ, will monitor potential impacts, respond to emerging issues, and maximise
positive outcomes for the region during construction
. EnergyCo says it was
developed in consultation with local communities, councils, Traditional Owners,
government agencies
and other stakeholders.
It is organised under eight themes: community, way of life, livelihoods, accessibility, health and wellbeing, culture, surroundings, and decision making systems.
The indicators, which are the part worth keeping
A commitment to manage impacts is worth very little without a number attached. This plan attaches them, with a frequency and an owner. These are the ones under the community theme:
| What is measured | How often | Owner |
|---|---|---|
| Community Attitudes Survey | Annually | ACEREZ |
| Proportion of workforce in volunteer programs | Annually | ACEREZ and EnergyCo |
| Number of short-term accommodation providers engaged | Quarterly | Not stated in the summary |
| Median weekly rent tracking | Quarterly | ACEREZ |
| Complaints regarding non-resident workforce behaviour | Monthly | Not stated in the summary |
| Crime incidents | Quarterly | Not stated in the summary |
Read that list as a statement of what the state expects to go wrong. Rent, crime and the behaviour of a large non-resident workforce are not neutral choices of metric; they are the three complaints that follow every construction boom in a country town, and someone has decided in advance that they will be counted rather than debated.
The baseline is 127 people
Those indicators are measured against a starting point. The plan says an online survey
formed part of the consultation, and that The survey, open between 10 February and
21 March 2025, was completed by 127 people.
It set the baseline for community
satisfaction, and An independent Community Attitudes survey will be run each year to
monitor community views
on how effectively impacts are being managed.
One hundred and twenty-seven responses is a thin foundation for a region of this size, and unlike some agencies EnergyCo does not dwell on that. It is not fatal, because the value of a baseline is mostly in the comparison rather than the absolute level: the same instrument run annually will show movement even if the starting number is imprecise. But a shift of a few points on a survey that size should not be reported as the region changing its mind, and we will not report it that way.
Where the actual numbers live, and why we cannot show them to you
EnergyCo publishes a SIM Plan Monitoring Dashboard covering the eight themes. It is a genuine act of transparency and we would rather it existed than not.
It is also embedded as an interactive Power BI report, which draws to a canvas. Our tooling can load the page and confirm the dashboard is there, but cannot read the values out of it, so this story reports the framework and not the readings. That is a limitation on our side, and we say so rather than paraphrasing numbers we have not seen. Anyone with a browser can open it and look.
Our view, labelled as such
The instinct with a document like this is to treat it as public relations, and the instinct is wrong. A plan that names median weekly rent and crime incidents as things it will publish quarterly has handed its critics a measuring stick. The interesting question is no longer whether the REZ affects rents. It is what the published figure says in August 2027, and whether anyone goes and looks.
The gap worth watching is ownership. Three of the six community indicators above list a responsible party in the summary and three do not, at least not in the summary document published for the public. An indicator without a named owner is the one that quietly stops being collected, and that is the thing to check when the next annual survey lands.
How we sourced this
We downloaded EnergyCo's Social Impact Management Plan Summary for the Central-West Orana REZ transmission project, first published June 2025, and read it, and we read EnergyCo's own SIM Plan and monitoring dashboard pages. Every quotation is from one of those and was verified as a contiguous span of the source text. The project figures come from an infographic on page 4, which a reading-order extraction scrambles and a layout-preserving extraction resolves; both were used and cross-checked, in opposite directions, against each other.
What we have not done, and it matters. We have not read the full SIM Plan, only the published summary, so an owner recorded here as not stated may well be named in the full document. We could not read the monitoring dashboard's values, which are rendered inside an embedded Power BI report, so we report no current figures at all. The plan sets baseline satisfaction measures as images rather than text and we have not reproduced any percentage, because we could not extract one and will not estimate it. We have not spoken to EnergyCo, ACEREZ or any council, and we have not sought resident reaction.
Sources
- EnergyCo, Social Impact Management Plan Summary, Central-West Orana Renewable Energy Zone Transmission Project (PDF, 20pp, first published June 2025, read 6 August 2026): the project figures of 240 km of transmission lines, two energy hubs, nine switching stations, two temporary accommodation camps and 1,800 temporary workers; the April 2025 appointment of ACEREZ and the 35-year term; the eight themes; the community-theme monitoring indicators, their frequencies and stated owners; and the Community Attitudes Survey dates, the 127 respondents and the annual independent survey.
- EnergyCo, Central-West Orana REZ Social Impact Management Plan and SIM Plan Monitoring Dashboard (read 6 August 2026): that the plan sets out how EnergyCo and ACEREZ will monitor impacts and respond to issues, that it was developed in consultation with communities, councils, Traditional Owners and agencies, and that the dashboard covers the eight themes.
Live near the transmission route, or work on the project? Tell us and we will check it against the plan and log the outcome on this page.