Outback Astronomy’s Hydrostor update explains what has happened since its NSW Land and Environment Court appeal concerning the Silver City Energy Storage project. The article outlines the beginning of consultation under the Court-approved conditions, Outback Astronomy’s continuous Sky Quality Meter monitoring, concerns about lighting and night-sky protection at Receiver R2, and a formal compliance complaint about Hydrostor’s Environmental Management Strategy. It also explains why careful records, monitoring and ongoing scrutiny remain important as the project moves towards construction.
Since our NSW Land and Environment Court (the Court) case concluded earlier this year, we have begun the consultation process required under the new Court-approved conditions for Hydrostor’s power station – the Silver City Energy Storage project.
At this stage, however, much of that consultation has been about how consultation itself will occur in the future, rather than the substantive issues that took us to Court in the first place.
Those issues include noise, lighting, monitoring and the protection of the night-time environment at Outback Astronomy.
For us, these are not abstract planning matters. Our business depends upon the quality of the night sky, the quiet of our location and the experience our guests come to Broken Hill to enjoy.
One important development is that we are now undertaking continuous Sky Quality Meter (SQM) monitoring at Outback Astronomy.
To date, Hydrostor has not undertaken light monitoring at our site. We began our own monitoring because we want an independent, long-term record of the natural night sky before construction begins. Sky brightness varies with moon phase, cloud, atmospheric conditions and other factors, so monitoring over an extended period gives a much more meaningful picture than a small number of observations taken on selected nights.
Importantly, the new Court-approved conditions require Hydrostor to prepare a Construction Light Management Plan that includes a monitoring program addressing construction-light impacts on us at Receiver R2 (our property is also referenced as this in the new Court-approved conditions). Light-monitoring data must be recorded and provided to us for a period before construction commences and periodically during construction.
Our own continuous dataset will therefore give us an independent record against which Hydrostor’s monitoring can be considered and compared. Given our experience throughout the assessment, Court and consultation processes, we believe maintaining our own objective record is both sensible and necessary.
We fought hard for those provisions because the original Lighting Impact Assessment prepared for the project raised serious questions for us.
Before Hydrostor publicly characterised our sky as “not dark”, neither we nor the broader Broken Hill community had been given the opportunity to examine that Lighting Impact Assessment.
Since the March 2026 Court case, we have further studied it, looking much more closely at where and how the original measurements had been taken and how our night sky had been classified.
That investigation has taken us into some surprisingly technical territory.
Among the matters we have been examining are the location and timing of the original measurements, the treatment of potentially contaminated readings, the method used to translate measured sky brightness into a Bortle classification, and how closely the assessment followed recognised scientific methods for measuring natural night-sky brightness.
There is much more to say about this, and we will return to it in a future article.
Broken Hill City Council ultimately supported the Hydrostor project, including a large industrial facility at 1.13 km from Outback Astronomy.
The project also involves a substantial planning agreement with Council.
Whatever view people take of the broader project, we believe one question deserved much greater scrutiny from the beginning:
What happens when industrial-scale lighting is introduced beside a business whose principal natural asset is darkness?
That question is one reason we went to Court.
The resulting Court-approved conditions contain important additional protections dealing with lighting, noise, consultation, monitoring and our particular circumstances as “Receiver R2”, the second-closest property nearby that stands to be most impacted by this power station given the impacts of noise and light.
More recently, we lodged a formal compliance complaint concerning Hydrostor’s Environmental Management Strategy, or EMS, which has been published on the NSW Planning Department’s Major Projects portal. We also provided a copy of our complaint to Hydrostor, in the expectation that any necessary corrections could be addressed promptly.
Our concern is straightforward.
The EMS does not appear to properly reflect a number of important additional requirements arising from the Court proceedings, including provisions specifically affecting Receiver R2. For example, it does not appear to address the required consultation with us and sharing of monitoring data, the additional light-monitoring requirements, or the requirement for Hydrostor to prepare a Construction Light Management Plan and a Construction Noise and Vibration Management Plan.
These were significant Court-approved conditions, so their apparent absence from the EMS is difficult to understand and is one of the reasons we lodged our compliance complaint.
These are not simply matters between Hydrostor and us. They are consent conditions applying to the project, and contractors, consultants and others involved in construction need to understand the conditions within which the project must operate.
We have therefore asked the NSW Planning Department to examine both the EMS and the way the Court-approved conditions are presently being implemented.
Three weeks later, we have not yet received a substantive response from either NSW Planning’s compliance team or Hydrostor. We will keep our customers informed as this matter develops.
We would much rather be spending our time showing our customers the beautiful stars.
But after everything that has happened, we have learned that careful records matter. We are now deliberately setting aside some stargazing-free days for monitoring, record-keeping, technical review and consultation work. Going forward, this may mean that stargazing is not available with us on many Sundays or Mondays.
That is also why we are monitoring our sky continuously, preserving the documentary record, examining technical reports closely and continuing to participate in consultation – even when that process can seem far removed from the practical questions of noise, light and environmental impact that matter most to us.
The Court case gave us stronger protections than existed before, but obtaining those protections came at a very significant cost to our small business. We were required to commit substantial time, energy and financial resources simply to argue for protections we believed should have been properly considered through the planning process in the first place.
For a small tourism business, that has consequences. Money that might otherwise have gone into improvements and investment has instead gone into protecting our home, our business and the night-sky experience our customers come here to enjoy. Even relatively ordinary projects, such as replacing our highway frontage signage, have taken longer than planned.
There has also been a very real imbalance throughout this process. We are a small locally owned business dealing with a major infrastructure project supported by substantial corporate resources. Broken Hill City Council supported the project, while we were left to pursue our concerns through the Court.
We did so because we believed those concerns were serious and deserved proper protection. The Court ultimately imposed stronger conditions, and we now expect those conditions to be properly implemented as the project moves towards construction.
Our job now is to make sure those protections are not merely words on paper.
And, as always, we will keep our customers informed about developments that may affect the extraordinary night sky you come here to experience.
Explore our upcoming night sky sessions and reserve your spot beneath the big Broken Hill skies.
Weather forecasting is not always simple in inland Australia. This short article explains why Outback Astronomy watches the bigger weather picture and recommends Phil Duncan’s WeatherWatchTV for plain-language climate and weather updates.
Since the NSW Land and Environment Court appeal, Outback Astronomy has begun consultation under the new Court-approved conditions and is now independently monitoring sky brightness at Receiver R2.
The spring night sky brings change to Broken Hill, with the Milky Way beginning to sink westward, Saturn climbing into the evening, and summer favourites preparing their return.
PLUS Ticket Inclusions
– Seating – reclined chair
– Sleeping Bag (in cooler months)
– Loan of an audio unit
– Optics suitable for the event*
– Side table
– Food and beverage service
Extras at Time of Booking
– Ear phones (or bring your own)
– Hot chocolate
– Options for other food, drinks
* Varies according to conditions.
** Only used in reclined chairs.
Standard Ticket Inclusions
– Seating
– Loan of an audio unit
– Optics suitable for the event*
Extras at Time of Booking
– Ear phones (or bring your own)
– Hot chocolate
– Reclined chair
– Reclined chair, sleeping bag**
– Options for other food, drinks
* Varies according to conditions.
** Only used in reclined chairs.
We use an audio system in most of our sky shows.
You should remember to bring your 3.5mm round plug/jack earphones – or you can purchase some when making an online booking if they are required for your event.
The following earphone connectors are not suitable – flat-style Apple Lightning, USB, Bluetooth or WiFi.
