The competing agendas that threaten to derail Australia’s renewable rollout

Onerous environmental regulations are delaying Australia’s ambitious renewable rollout and threatening the federal government’s climate commitments, with just two wind farms approved in the past 15 months under flagship green protection laws.

It is now taking between two and three years for assessments of renewable projects to be completed, investors say, even as Climate Change Minister Chris Bowen says Australia must accelerate renewable energy generation over the next six years to double the current level of 40 per cent of the grid.

Credit: Digital artwork — Alex Ellinghausen / Jamie Brown

The number of wind farm approvals has dropped from six in 2022 to just two since the start of 2023, as Bowen’s goal to boost renewables to 82 per cent of the electricity grid by 2030 collides with Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek’s role in vetting large developments for the risks they pose to nature.

“It is dire in terms of committed projects – we are just not seeing enough,” said Clean Energy Investor Group chief executive Simon Corbell, who represents investors such as Macquarie, Neoen and Blackrock.

“Onshore wind needs to do the heavy lifting in the national electricity market, and we need a lot more onshore wind to meet our generation capacity requirements.”

Clean Energy Council chief executive Kane Thornton said that in 2023, there was a slowdown in new financial commitments in grid-scale generation capacity from $6.5 billion in 2022 to $1.5 billion.

The council, the biggest renewable energy industry group, released figures this week showing investment in wind and solar farms had fallen 80 per cent in the past year.

“This reflects a more complex and challenging landscape for new investment decisions, which continue to include a constrained grid, slow planning and environmental assessment processes in some jurisdictions, higher costs and tighter markets for equipment and labour,” Thornton said.

Despite significant increases in renewable energy production across Australia, coal-fired power stations still supply up to two-thirds of the energy mix. Replacing coal with more renewables is the cornerstone of the federal government’s climate policy and its goal to cut emissions by 43 per cent on 2005 levels by 2030.

But the speed with which the government needs renewable energy to come online is clashing with the environmental assessments such projects must undergo.

Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek is working on the government’s promised reforms to the flagship Commonwealth environmental protection legislation, the Environmental Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act, which were promised during the 2022 federal election campaign.

A slowdown in wind farm project approvals is risking the Albanese government’s climate goals. Credit: Synergy

At the heart of those reforms – which were supposed to enter parliament last year – is a promise to speed up project approval timeframes while also bolstering environmental protections.

Plibersek said additional measures to accelerate approvals would be unveiled shortly.

“We’re reforming our laws to give quicker, clearer decisions for business and better protection for our precious plants, animals and places,” she said.

Plibersek said the Albanese government had approved 43 renewable energy projects since coming to office in May 2022, a doubling of the decision-making rate of the former Coalition government.

Australia’s extinction rate is one of the worst in the world, with about 100 of Australia’s unique flora and fauna species wiped out since colonisation, and 1900 threatened species now at a heightened risk of extinction. Plibersek has promised to halt native species extinctions.

Australian Conservation Foundation chief executive Kelly O’Shanassy said the legislative changes must not tip the balance towards development.

“Breaking Australia’s dangerous fixation with climate-wrecking gas and coal and powering everything we can with renewables is an important and a massive task, but we don’t need to wreck threatened species habitat or knock down rainforests to do it,” she said.

“There is absolutely no need, on our over-cleared continent, to damage nature to build renewable energy projects.”

Corbell said environmental reforms could strike a balance between nature and industry, but stressed that more weight should be placed on renewables’ ability to displace the production of greenhouse gas emissions that are dangerously heating the planet.

He said important improvements to project assessments could be made without changing the laws.

“When it comes to the assessment of overall impact of a project, its contribution to reducing Australia’s overall carbon emissions footprint should be able to be taken into account, but at the moment, it’s not,” Corbell said.

Corbell said the government must legislate reforms before the end of the year to keep the 2030 renewable target within reach.

“It’s still feasible to achieve it [the 82 per cent renewables target], but only if regulatory barriers are substantially addressed, and they really need to be addressed this year,” he said.

Bowen on Thursday pointed to a sharp increase in spending on large-scale storage, such as big batteries.

He said 2023 had been a record year for investment in large-scale storage, with investment more than doubling from 2022.

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