Speech to AFR Energy Summit, Sydney

From the shore of Port Jackson to the Cooks River, these lands and waters have been under the stewardship of the Gadigal peoples for millennia, a fact we acknowledge and celebrate.

I want to acknowledge another fact.

That Australia’s energy transformation is also an opportunity to transform indigenous disadvantage into First Nations opportunities.

We are rebuilding our energy system and this is an opportunity to work with First Nations communities to build engagement, equity and ownership, so that we move from managing welfare, to managing wealth.

Some of you might have heard me observe previously that only a very small fraction of Australian renewable energy projects have an element of indigenous ownership, compared to 20 per cent in Canada.

This shows we have a lot to do, but it also shows me there is a way to do it.

I, and the Government, are determined to do it, in partnership with the renewable energy industry and First Nations Peoples. And I look forward to releasing our First Nations Clean Energy strategy soon.

Reading some of the major mastheads in Australia you’d be forgiven for thinking the transition to renewable energy has ground to a halt.

It hasn’t.

I want to talk today about just how far Australia has come in a short amount of time.

About what progress we have made in the past two and a half years and also about the massive amount left to do.

As with any big change there are challenges. Every reform, every change worth doing faces challenges. As the old saying goes, we don’t choose to do these things because they are easy.

But these challenges are far from insurmountable.

I’ve said before that this is the critical decade.

Critical for our energy grid.

And for our economy.

And critical for the climate.

As critical as this decade is, there are plenty in the political debate who call for us to slow down, to pause, to do less.

This is to misunderstand the emissions challenge.

But it is also a recipe for energy unreliability and insecurity. 

I’ll say more about this in a few minutes.

I’m old enough to remember when climate change denial was quite common in the Australian political debate.

It’s much less common now because climate change is a lived reality, not a contestable prediction.

But blatant climate denial has been replaced by something arguably more dangerous.

The excellent author, scientist and commentator Michael Mann calls this “climate inactivism”.

Instead of denying the science of climate change, coming up with any number of other excuses as why action should be delayed or avoided.

In the current Australian political debate I call it “all too hard-ism”.

The lines are familiar:

“The roll out is too slow to meet the targets, so let’s rely more on old energy”

“Renewable energy is controversial in the regions, it will be too hard”

“Renewable energy takes up too much space, so just pause it and develop a nuclear industry”

“It’s all too hard to make car companies send their cleaner, cheaper cars to Australia.”

Now I can talk about all those things and more when we get to Q and A. 

But relatedly, I want to concentrate in my remarks today on an update on progress in getting to 82% renewable electricity in the grid.

Last month marked the highest level of renewables in the national electricity market, ever. 46 per cent.

Of course, at times renewables were a much higher proportion of our grid.

Two weeks ago today, we hit the maximum ever recorded, at just over 74 per cent. At the same time five years ago, it was only around 46 per cent. This progress is an indication of what is possible.

In fact, the volume of renewables has increased 25 per cent since we came to government.

Australians are adding about 5,000 solar systems to their roofs every week.

More new solar, wind and battery capacity across Australia has reached financial close this year, in October already, than in all of 2023.

In the next five months, another five and a half gigawatts of capacity is due for financial close.

AEMO confirms there’s already just over 21 GW of committed and actionable projects in the system to be delivered by 2034.

That’s solar, wind, water and batteries. And that doesn’t include offshore wind.

Think about it for a moment – that’s almost double the capacity that the Coalition’s proposed nuclear scheme is expected to deliver. By 2050. Delivered by 2034.

In two and a half years, Minister Plibersek has issued planning approval for 63 renewable projects, more than during the Abbott and Turnbull Governments combined. It represents enough power for the equivalent of 7 million homes. 

Our last budget contained $135 million to support faster consideration of renewable projects.

People often ask me whether I really think we can hit our targets.

Between this pipeline, and the work we’re doing with state and territory governments through our Capacity Investment Scheme and Renewable Energy Transformation Agreements, yes, I do.

The rollout is happening.

The previous Government promised a capacity investment mechanism, but they couldn't deliver it. They wanted to include gas in their mechanism. They couldn’t get agreement on it.

We designed a Capacity Investment Scheme to support clean, reliable renewable energy projects.

I expected it to work well, and it’s working better than I thought it would.

In December last year, we opened applications for new dispatchable capacity, such as big batteries, to be built in Victoria and South Australia.

This was a pilot auction for the broader scheme. And that pilot has been very successful.

The market response for this was huge. Massively oversubscribed.

We wanted 600 megawatts.

We received bids for 19 gigawatts – 32 times more than what we asked for.

Our first national tender for 6 gigawatts of variable generation, had 40 gigawatts of bids register and 27 GW of very high quality bids go through to the next stage.

We only asked for six.

This market interest confirms for me that the pipeline of good quality renewable projects is strong.

We are yet to award the winners of this auction, but I have received advice from my department that the quality of the projects is very strong.

Accordingly, I am pleased to announce today that we have decided to make the next round of auctions bigger than originally envisaged to get more of these high-quality projects connected to the grid more quickly.

We originally planned that the next two tender rounds would call for 2 gigawatts of dispatchable renewable power and 4 gigawatts of renewable energy generation.

I’m announcing today that this auction will now be for 4 gigawatts of dispatchable power and 6 gigawatts of renewable generation.

So that’s a total of 10 gigawatts of new energy to be tendered over coming months and delivered by December 2029.

Market briefs for this will tender round will be released shortly and the tender process will be open in mid-November.

And we’re working closely with states and territories to secure investment certainty for renewable energy projects.

This happens through renewable energy agreements which secure a guaranteed allocation of federally supported projects for a state, in return for obligations on all parties to collaborate to achieve our targets.

That includes working together to lower the obstacles that developers, communities, and governments face in delivering new projects including planning reforms.

And they recognise that we need continual improvements to our planning systems to ensure faster approvals or refusals for renewable energy and transmission to help us meet our targets.

So we have very strong investment appetite for delivering more renewables quickly.

We have the project pipeline.

We have strong community engagement practices and meaningful benefits flowing through to local areas from new renewable generation projects.

But we also need to continue to expand and strengthen our transmission grid to ensure the new energy we are bringing on can get to where it will be consumed.

AEMO estimates we need 5,000km of transmission lines to be built, or upgraded between now and 2030. About a quarter of that is already under construction or complete.

We’re working closely and constructively with the states and TNSPs to get this done.

We’ve brought on rule changes to strengthen community engagement and early works processes to drive better outcomes and reduce the risk of delays.

We’ve bolstered the role and reach of the office of the Australian Energy Infrastructure Commissioner with an extra $21m in this year’s budget.

Last month I announced Tony Mahar will step in to the role from his current position as CEO of the National Farmers Federation.

Tony will become Commissioner in December. He has lived and breathed rural and regional communities.

He knows rural communities and he’ll be drawing on his knowledge and experience to make sure consultation with those communities is as good as it should be and that there are meaningful, long-term benefits for those communities.

Tony’s appointment is in keeping with our Government’s general approach: when we see someone with skills, with passion and with understanding of the issues, we seek to sign them up to help us with this transition regardless of their background or political views. 

It’s the same approach which saw us appoint Matt Kean as Chair of the Climate Change Authority a few months ago.

Both Tony and Matt will play important roles in this vital national journey.

And in relation to communities, at the July meeting of energy and climate change ministers in Melbourne, we agreed to create new voluntary developer standards.

We also agreed to work with states and territories on a list of up to 20 projects at a time that will be deemed of national priority in the approvals system.

These will be decided by taking into consideration key factors including energy output, socio-economic, environmental and heritage considerations.

These projects will have dedicated federal environmental planning case managers as part of their priority listing.

Prioritising these projects through relevant Commonwealth, and state and territory regulatory assessments will support faster decisions, reducing delays for projects and providing greater certainty for businesses.

As I said earlier, we’ve put nearly $135 million towards this, and other measures designed to lower the risk of project delays, in the May budget.

We’re also taking concrete steps to address labour supply shortages, allocating nearly $460 million in funding to help fast track new training needed produce the skilled clean energy workforce Australia needs.

All this is important because there’s a lot at stake in keeping this transition moving fast, and not just for emissions.

Transmission investment is expected to deliver a total net benefit of approximately $22 billion before 2052, both in avoided costs and emissions reduction benefits.

Both the Capacity Investment Scheme and Rewiring the Nation were designed as low-cost financing and underwriting specifically to help lower network costs, and put downward pressure on wholesale prices.

The CEFC’s investment in the Central West Orana REZ is a good example of this, delivering hundreds of millions in benefit to NSW electricity consumers by lowering project costs.

The CIS and Rewiring policies also increase timely delivery of projects and reduce supply chain risks.

On Humelink and VNI West, the TNSP indicated federal funding to underwrite early procurement of long lead items has avoided expected delays and saved consumers about $145 million.

Increasing the Commonwealth’s equity share in Marinus Link, and the concessionality of debt financing will support on-time project delivery and materially reduce Marinus Link’s costs to consumers.

Now the Opposition wants to abolish Rewiring the Nation.

David Littleproud wants to cancel transmission projects full stop. This willfully ignores some hard truths.

New transmission will be required to modernise the grid and meet growing energy demand, whether a Labor or Coalition government is in power.

Transmission is necessary for new energy, regardless of how it is produced. Governments around the world are doing similar.

Take Ontario for example, the poster child of the coalition’s nuclear plan. Their equivalent of the ISP outlines between $20 and $60 billion Canadian dollars of necessary transmission investment.

The real danger with the Coalition’s nuclear scheme is the uncertainty it deliberately creates.

In relation to our grid, investment is vital now.

We lost 4 gigawatts of dispatchable energy over the last decade, replaced by just one gigawatt.

Far and away the biggest threat to reliability in our grid is over-reliance on aging coal fired power stations.

Over the past year, there hasn’t been a day without an unplanned outage at a coal fired power generator on the east coast.

Let me give you some examples from the last few weeks.

On October 1, to pick a day, we had 5 gigawatts of coal fired power out of action.

Most of it was planned maintenance, necessary for aging coal fired power stations to ensure they are available over summer.

But a full 1.7 gigawatts was unplanned, unexpected outages.  Or to put it more plainly: breakdowns.

Four coal fired power units broke down unexpectedly. Two in Queensland, one in NSW and one in Victoria.

One of those plants is expected to be out of action until November.

Here’s the thing: coal fired power stations don’t get more reliable as they get older.

We are living that every day.

But the Liberals plan is, explicitly, to run these old coal fired power stations harder and longer.

This is a recipe for unreliability. Bluntly, it’s a recipe for blackouts.

We don’t have the luxury of delaying investment in new generation for another 15 or 20 years while we wait for a new form of energy generation that Australia has never had.

I don’t always agree with your Angela MacDonald-Smith, but she was right when she wrote last month that the nuclear debate has left the energy industry – the people who need to make the transition happen – disengaged.

We’re getting closer to an election.

The Coalition are willing to increase sovereign risk for political gain.

They want to chill investment in renewables.

To ignore the massive opportunities Australia has to benefit from the global shift to net zero.

The decade of delay and denial under their previous Government is a certainty under any future Coalition government.

They have given up any veneer of meaningful action on climate change.

As I said earlier, this transition is not easy. It is unprecedented.

But it’s also unavoidable.

We’ve put the right settings in place to get on with it. And continuing to get on with it is exactly what I intend to do.