Australia’s political parties remain locked in battle over what to do about emi8ssions reductions and energy policy, but that has not stopped 2018 being a boom year for renewable energy.
According to the latest Clean Energy Australia (CEA) report, released today the amount of renewable energy capacity committed in Australia during 2018 increased 260 per cent on 2017, with 14.8 gigawatt (GW) underway in 2018 compared to 5.6GW in 2017.
The upbeat industry report card comes as the Energy Minister in the conservative Liberal-National government, Angus Taylor, told parliament on its last day of sitting before a general election in May that Australia’s 2020 large scale Renewable Energy Target (RET) of 33,000GWh will be met ahead of time.
Mr Taylor also reported that approximately 5.2GW of new renewable capacity was added during 2018, and revealed a forecast from the Clean Energy Regulator predicting an increase to at least 6.5GW in 2019, with the trend likely to persist in 2020 and 2021.
The new CEA report reveals renewable energy generated 7000 jobs since 2017, with investment in large-scale renewable energy doubling to $20 billion.
Renewable energy generation now comprises 21 per cent of the market, which is a record share.
The report said more than two million households now had rooftop solar, and the installed capacity of household solar now topped 8.1GW, which is four times the capacity of the ageing coal-fired Liddell power plant in New South Wales.
It said the top three postcodes with the highest uptake of rooftop solar were Bundaberg, Hervey Bay and Toowoomba, all in the heartland of the conservative National Party.
The chief executive of the Clean Energy Council, Kane Thornton, noted while the industry was doing extremely well, “unfortunately, the politics around energy reached another new low in 2018, with the federal government opting to tear itself apart rather than implement its own National Energy Guarantee (NEG) policy”.
Mr Thornton said while the coming federal election would create another pivotal year for clean energy in Australia, “we have thankfully reached a point where politics isn’t as existential to the industry as it once was”.
The upbeat trends in renewable energy comes as the Australian Energy Market Commission (AEMC) reports that Australia’s energy grid is meeting consumers’ needs, but also noted the energy market operator is intervening more frequently to preserve the stability of the network.
The AEMC said the switch in the mix in favour of cleaner and greener technologies was a structural change that was putting pressure on power system security and reliability.
The new report notes system security–related costs are a relatively small proportion of a customer’s total bill, “however, these costs are increasing, with potential flow-through effects to consumer bills in coming years”.
While the AEMC is concerned about a looming crunch point, with the upcoming retirement of thermal coal power stations across the eastern seaboard and deteriorating system strength, the energy market operator has already declared the future of power generation in Australia will be renewable energy with storage, and gas.
It also said with those technologies were able to replace the p
ower currently supplied by coal generators at a lower cost.
In its integrated system plan released last year, the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) noted that 30 per cent of Australia’s coal generators will approach the end of their technical life over the next two decades.
It said it was important to avoid premature departures if the looming transition in the national energy market was to be orderly.
At the same time AEMO said the lowest-cost replacement options for retiring coal plants “will be a portfolio of resources, including solar (28GW), wind (10.5GW) and storage (17GW and 90GWh), complemented by 500MW of flexible gas plant and transmission investment”.
The energy market operator concluded that mix of generation can produce 90 terawatt hours of energy a year, “more than offsetting the energy lost from retiring coal-fired generation”.
It also noted that transmission infrastructure would need to be reinforced to ensure the grid performed optimally after the shift.
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