Clean Energy Council says ‘big acceleration’ in renewable electricity projects needed to reach 2030 target

Chris Bowen will unveil six new battery projects under his signature Capacity Investment Scheme amid warnings there will need to be a ‘big acceleration’ of large-scale renewables.

Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen. Picture: NewsWire / Lachie Millard

Chris Bowen will unveil six new battery projects under his signature Capacity Investment Scheme amid warnings there will need to be a “big acceleration” of large-scale renewables if the government is to reach its target of 82 per cent renewable energy by 2030.

The Clean Energy Council’s latest quarterly investment report found there were financial commitments for renewable energy projects with 1.6GW of capacity in the first half of the year, surpassing the 1.3GW committed to for all of 2023.

But it cautioned that “a big acceleration in financial commitments for generation projects will be ­required in the second half of the 2024 calendar year in order to achieve an annual run rate of 6–7GW per annum of financial commitments for large-scale generation projects – the rate required in order to set Australia on the path to the target of 82 per cent renewable energy generation by the end of 2030”.

“It is pleasing to see investment in large-scale generation continuing to move in the right direction, but we are not yet at the levels we need to see,” CEC chief executive Kane Thornton said.

It comes as Mr Bowen, the Climate Change and Energy Minister, will declare the Capacity Investment Scheme is “working even better than expected” and ­reveal six “very high quality battery projects” in Victoria and South Australia will deliver nearly 1000MW of storage by 2027, 400MW more than the government asked for.

“We received bids for 19GW – 32 times more than what we asked for,” Mr Bowen will say at the Gippsland New Energy Conference on Wednesday.

“We are able to over-deliver on our promise because of the high quality of bids received.

“This is a huge indication of the strength and quality of the projects underpinning our transition, that are ready to be delivered now.

“These projects will soak up cheap, clean energy from renewable generation, to be discharged into the grid as needed, 24 hours a day, seven days a week.”

One of the projects, the Springvale Energy Hub in southeastern Melbourne, will provide 50 full-time and part-time jobs during design and construction compared to just seven ongoing jobs once the facility is complete.

Opposition climate change and energy spokesman Ted O’Brien seized on the CEC’s report as further evidence the government’s “renewables-only energy plan is failing catastrophically”.

“As Labor forces 90 per cent of our 24/7 baseload power out of the grid over the next 10 years and it suffocates the supply of gas, we now learn that its renewables rollout is way behind schedule,” Mr O’Brien said.

“It is closing one system without having another one ready to go.

“There’s a mountain of evidence that Labor’s energy plan isn’t working, but they are refusing to shift direction.”

Ramping up the pre-election energy attack on the Coalition, Mr Bowen will also insist Peter ­Dutton’s nuclear plan is a “recipe for uncertainty, and I believe ­deliberately so”.

“Nuclear energy for Australia is, at best, decades away. And it is so expensive that even the ­Coalition has admitted it would have to be built and funded by the government, rather than through private, commercial investment,” Mr Bowen will tell the energy conference.

“Why would a renewable energy company want to invest in Australia if they know they will be competing with a government ­distortion of the market in the order of hundreds of billions of dollars?

“It’s a recipe to drive away investment in clean, cheap, renewable generation. And it’s a recipe for unreliability.”