Labor opens up ‘stunning’ green investment opportunity

Labor’s target to increase renewable penetration to at least 80 per cent by 2030 from about 30 per cent today means the country’s total capacity of renewable energy generation will need to be tripled in just eight years, he said.

In addition to that is the huge opportunity opening up in industrial decarbonisation through projects for green steel, green aluminium and green fuels, for example, as well as longer-term green exports as part of the vision to turn Australia into a renewable energy superpower, where the scale of investment required that will overtake that in the domestic power sector, Mr Scaysbrook added.

“As a bus person and so focused on green economy this is the most hopeful that we have been in a decade in being able to increase the significance of Australia as a market for future investment,” Mr Scaysbrook told reporters on Tuesday.

“What is filling us with hope is there’s a genuine intent to create a rapid shift in deployment of more green energy and renewables, and also to start capturing the opportunities that lie at Australia’s feet in industrial decarbonisation. That is probably more significant I think than decarbonising the domestic power industry.”

But he pointed to large-scale reforms needed in the National Electricity Market to help provide certainty for investors, primarily the introduction of a “capacity market” that would support the transition and spur investment in clean, dispatchable electricity generation, but also improvements in transmission and accelerating permitting.

Initiatives such as Labor’s $20 billion grid improvement plan and the Greens’ proposed $15 billion green manufacturing fund would also help, but also practical changes in improving permitting and transmission easements, and increasing government resource capacity and

Mr Scaysbrook also pointed to several big investors looking to make “very significant” capital commitments in green hydrogen and clean manufacturing.

“Here in Australia we do have a champion of hydrogen in Fortescue Future Industries ….but they’re not the only ones that are out there in the world that are getting prepared to make very, very significant capital commitments to drive this forward,” he said.

“In Australia we have what most other countries don’t have that they relish and that is large tracts of land that can be developed for solar and wind production, we have access to port facilities, we have relatively good shipping access to export markets.

“So we have a lot of the things that the rest of the world would love to have if they were trying to develop these green export industries.”