2025-09-01
The good and the bad of Australia’s energy transition
By Dr Peter Sprivulis, a member of Fremantle-Tangney Greens and a semi-retired emergency physician and digital health specialist.
August 2025: The Australian Government’s oxymoronically named Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water has just published its 2025 Australian Energy Statistics Update Report.
It makes startling reading for anyone interested in the conflict between our Federal Government’s responses to climate change, environmental protection & water security policies and their ongoing policies supporting fossil fuel extraction, exports and consumption. A conflict which this single mega-department is supposed to manage.
First the good news….
Renewables are going gangbusters and now comprise over a third of Australian electricity generation ‒ 35% in 2023-2024. Photovoltaic solar power (solar PV) in particular has grown from almost nothing in the mid-2000s to 175 petajoules in 2023–24 and now accounts for just over half of all renewable energy generation.
Solar PV continues rapid growth, some 17 per cent, during 23-24. The last six years have seen large-scale (i.e. grid scale) solar PV power generation grow more than 20-fold and more is on the way. We can also expect domestic rooftop solar PV with battery backup to spike further this year; stimulated by the combined effect of WA State Government and Federal battery rebates. These coming into play during the current financial year.
The story for wind energy is not quite so exciting. Wind energy generation actually declined slightly in 23–24 in contrast to the average 12 per cent annual growth rate over the last decade. But like solar, there is certainly more to come.
Alongside electricity generation capacity, gridscale batteries are being added, respecting the reality that solar and wind are intermittent energy sources that require output smoothing and storage.
A recent example is the Waratah Super Battery. The first 700 megawatt hours of storage (of a total 1680 megawatt hours) is in operation and capable of delivering 350 megawatts of power. This is a similar output to a medium sized coal fired power station; albeit the battery will drain completely at that rate in just a couple of hours. A genuine benefit is the batteries responsiveness to grid supply and demand. Think less than a second to respond to fluctuations in grid electricity supply ‒ rather than the hours it takes to bring a coal fired power station online.
So all good right? These renewable and grid resilience energy achievements indicate we are heading in the right direction. Hmmm… not quite.
So now for the bad news
The stark reality is that fossil fuels still comprise about 90 percent of Australia’s total energy consumption. Of this, the fossil fuel consumption mix is split roughly 40/30/30 percent for oil, gas and coal respectively. I honestly thought we were doing better than this.
Fossil fuel consumption appeared to peak temporarily at about 5,500 petajoules just before COVID. Consumption then dipped during the COVID lockdowns and slow return to business as usual. Since then, fossil fuel consumption has steadily grown over the last five years, despite a slight contraction in coal use. It will likely pass the old peak in the next couple of years if Australia avoids an economic recession.
The growth in natural gas consumption has been higher than the gangbusting growth in renewables. Gas consumption has grown 9.2 percent annually, roughly double the rate of growth of renewables at 4.9% over the last decade. Restated more depressingly, the ‘bad news’ growth of fossil fuel consumption has been outpacing the ‘good news’ growth in renewable energy consumption. That is, we have not been transitioning from fossil fuels to renewables as a nation yet. Rather, we have been merely adding renewables to our growing fossil fuel consumption.
Unfortunately, the report offers even worse news when we look at total energy production rather than consumption. Australia exports to other countries more than twice as much burnable fossils as we consume, for those countries to subsequently burn and pump Aussie-Sourced CO2 in the atmosphere! You are allowed to read this paragraph again.
And in case you were wondering, YES, coal is still the dominant form of energy Australia produces, making up some two thirds of total energy production. Natural gas makes up most of the rest, noting that if you squint closely at the chart below, you can see a sliver of green. That is, total renewable energy production, layered over the fossil fuels on the chart, is dwarfed by our nation’s fossil fuel production.
Western Australia is not covering itself in glory
The report has some interesting comparative statistics. The State by State energy consumption mix especially caught my eye. In WA, the only state without meaningful climate targets, renewables make up only 5% of our energy consumption mix. Only the NT has a lower proportion of renewables consumption. This anaemic effort surprised me, given WA’s abundant wind and solar resources and the pace of adoption of domestic solar PV across the state. The report demonstrates instead that we remain addicted to gas, which contributes over half of our WA energy consumption mix.
In summary, as much as we applaud the addition of renewables and grid scale energy storage solutions to our energy mix ‒ and their ongoing growth ‒ it is important to appreciate that addition is not the same as transition. There is no sign yet that fossil fuel consumption, or production, is edging meaningfully lower; either in total or as a proportion of Australia’s overall energy mix.
It is hard to see this picture changing while we have a single, internally conflicted, Federal Government Department overseeing both the consequences for climate, environment and water security and the cause ‒ rampant fossil fuel production and consumption. And it isn’t as though we are not experiencing serious climate and environmental consequences already (warning: this link is for the bravest amongst you only). Clearly, change is needed. But what change if we are to free ourselves from fossil fuel dependency?
Coherent action
To begin with, as the WA Greens are campaigning, we need meaningful targets for reductions in fossil fuel consumption and even more importantly, production. It is well past the time to sunset, rather than ongoingly approve, our fossil fuel production. Given our abundant wind and solar resources, we can further accelerate renewable energy additions to electricity generation. We even have the technology to export renewably generated electricity.
However, for that renewable electricity generation to substitute for fossil fuels in heavy consuming sectors, like transport, we need to incentivise electrification of those sectors. Incentivising the use of electric train transport, rather than diesel truck transport, for freight movement is one example.
I would also like to see incentives rewarding more efficient personal transport energy consumption. Free public transport instead of personal vehicle transport tax deductions is an obvious policy choice that could be implemented quickly. A particular bugbear is the government subsidised giant, toddler-crushing, suburban mega-dualcab craze. Removing the tradie subsidy for these blights on our roads would be money well saved to deploy elsewhere.
Finally, we need to add alternatives to gas in our energy mix here in WA to reduce our dependence on it as a back up to intermittent renewable energy production. Batteries, while important, can’t do it all. Nuclear power makes no economic sense, let alone the difficulties of gaining any kind of social licence given the waste issues and timescales to implement.
Instead, I would like us to bring online another abundant energy source we are blessed with in Australia. Geothermal energy can and should be part of our energy mix. Geothermal isn’t intermittent; but can be turned on or off rapidly, which makes it an ideal complement to our investments in wind and solar PV. At present, policymakers appear blind to the role geothermal could be playing in our energy mix. I intend drilling into geothermal (pun intended) in detail in the near future.
Until then, it is good to remind ourselves that via coherent policy action we can change course and remove from our lives things that harm us. Remember cigarette advertising?
[Opinions expressed are those of the author and not official policy of Greens WA]