Labor's victory has locked in an ingredient vital to supplying super cheap power

The Age

16-05-2025

With Labor's victory, Merzian says, more investors are planning to tap the $70 billion program. 'I know about a dozen companies that are now preparing their bids for all these future projects, and there were a couple who were on the line about whether to do so.
'It's worth remembering that 70 per cent of Australia's investment for large-scale clean energy projects comes from overseas. And so investors have a choice of where they put their money ... and this is giving a boost to Australia being the destination choice.'
Merzian warns, though, that the industry faces other road blocks. For the federal government to reach its goals it must secure the construction of transmission lines capable of reliably moving this new power from regional renewable energy zones to the cities. Efforts to rebuild the transmission system have been hampered by resistance from some community members who resent the imposition of vast towers and lines across landscapes they love.
The sector also relies on the support of state government planning departments that the Commonwealth cannot control. Where once the industry complained about delays in the NSW Planning Department and gravitated towards Queensland, a change of government in Queensland has seen a change in its priorities.
For Danny Nielsen, the Australian country manager of Danish-based global wind giant Vestas, there are immediate practical implications from the certainty that Labor's re-election brings.
Vestas owns or co-owns nine energy projects in Australia, including a 1200 megawatt wind farm near Tara, in the Western Downs area of Queensland, which is planned to include up to 164 turbines the company expects to cost between $2 billion and $3 billion when complete, as well as projects near Toowomba in Queensland and Mudgee in NSW.
'We now know that policy [supporting the renewables industry] is going to stay in place,' Nielsen says. 'We have a very clear certainty on that … and that means we can shore up the supply, and we can shore up the manpower.'
And what does that mean in practical terms? 'What I'm looking into for the next four years is that we will probably see our workforce grow by 50 per cent, and we're employing just over 1000 people today.'
Most of those jobs will be in construction and development, but Nielsen says there will be jobs in servicing and maintaining the wind farms throughout their life, which is expected to be up to 35 years.
'These are long-term, stable jobs for people in regional areas.'
Addressing the Energy Users Association of Australia conference in the days after the poll, economist Ross Garnaut, author of the 2008 Garnaut Climate Change Review for the Rudd Labor government, said Labor's win was so emphatic that it had secured a historic opportunity to embrace radical reform, particularly in energy and climate policy.
Energy policy and Australia's participation in the necessary global movement to net zero emissions has been 'ground zero for political conflict and policy instability', he said, making energy more expensive and less secure.
'To establish sound policies, we all have to step back from the clang of climate and energy politics in recent years.'
Garnaut believes Labor's victory will accelerate the energy transition, to the benefit of the climate, energy users and investors.
But existing policies will not be enough to see Australia reach 82 per cent, let alone to reap the potential benefits of a truly clean economy, Garnaut says.
Through the Superpower Institute, the policy group he formed with economist and former chair of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission Rod Sims, Garnaut has long argued that if it acts fast enough, Australia can profit from going into negative emissions.
This would see the vast deployment of renewables that would then be used to create export goods such as green iron to help other nations reach their own climate targets. In doing so, Australia would be exporting green energy embodied in the products.
The potential earnings, he argues, would vastly outweigh those we would surrender in ending the export of fossil fuels.
But this would take serious reform, including either the extension of incentives to green investors or a price put on the carbon pollution of older industries.
The government's Future Made in Australia policy, an economic plan announced last year under which the government has committed to spend $24 billion supporting new industries, is a step in the right direction, Garnaut says. But it is not enough.
'We must systematically reward the innovator, the early investors in new processes, new technologies because the pioneers generate knowledge from which everyone benefits,' he says.
Loading
'They'll make mistakes, they'll carry additional costs. That's what pioneers always do. And so that has to be systematically supported by government.'
So, was the size of Labor's victory enough to silence the sound and fury of politics, or as he calls it 'the clang'?
'The electoral catastrophe in metropolitan Australia should cause the Coalition to end the clang quickly, by supporting Australia playing its full part in the global movement to net zero,' Garnaut tells this masthead. 'The early signs are that the clang will die slowly, through continuing electoral disappointment. The weakening of the clang allows the government to get on with the job.'