Big energy investors wary of climate wars, Bowen says

Nervous investors are seeking reassurances from the Albanese government over the fate of the renewables rollout, Energy Minister Chris Bowen has revealed, amid deepening uncertainty over the opposition’s vision for renewable energy in the future power mix.

In a speech on Wednesday, Bowen said he had been approached by renewable energy investors concerned that the Coalition’s pledge to build nuclear plants and scrap Australia’s 2030 climate target would jeopardise their ability to keep bankrolling energy projects.

Energy Minister Chris Bowen at the National Press Club in Canberra on Wednesday.Credit: AAPIMAGE

Bowen’s remarks followed opposition energy spokesman Ted O’Brien’s statement to an industry conference on Wednesday that renewable energy could not be the grid’s “predominant” energy source in the future. Wind, solar and hydropower already account for more than 40 per cent of the mix.

“We are on our own internationally thinking that we can have an electricity grid run predominantly by intermittent wind and solar,” O’Brien said.

He has said renewables would play an important role in the electricity grid but argued against “putting all our eggs in one basket”.

The opposition has not detailed its policies for renewable energy or the electricity grid, but said it would do so, including specific plans on the role of gas, before the election due by May next year.

O’Brien’s remarks contrast with the Albanese government’s goal to raise the share of renewable electricity in the grid to 82 per cent by 2030. The government has underwritten schemes to encourage investment but is not bankrolling projects with public money.

Bowen was asked at the National Press Club in Canberra if major investors had voiced worries over the lack of bipartisan support for the government’s renewables goals.

“It has been raised with me as a concern by renewable energy investors,” he said.

“But I’m not aware of any particular decision that has been taken to say we were going to invest and now we’re not.”

The Investor Group on Climate Change, a coalition of 104 global and local institutional investors including AustralianSuper, Cbus, Fidelity, BlackRock and Vanguard, warned in June that the opposition’s plans to intervene in the market to prop up nuclear energy would derail investment plans.

“Suggestions that nuclear energy has a role in Australia’s energy mix works directly against that confidence that underpins the near-term investment in new renewable energy supply and risks damaging Australia’s overall prosperity,” Investor Group on Climate Change managing director Erwin Jackson said.

Opposition Leader Peter Dutton reignited the climate wars in June when he pledged to cancel Australia’s legally binding 2030 climate target and use taxpayers’ money to build seven nuclear plants, each potentially housing multiple reactors, between 2035 and 2050.

Bowen warned that a Coalition government would cause private investment to dry up.

“All these investments and many more like them are at risk because of the policy uncertainty caused by an ill-informed nuclear frolic,” he said.

“Their ideological pursuit of nuclear reactors in two decades’ time would wreck the renewables rollout now.”

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