Antinuclear

‘Fork in the road’: How a failed nuclear plot locked in Australia’s renewable future

The Age By Nick Toscano, June 1, 2025

hen Australians went to the polls and voted Anthony Albanese back as prime minister, they also voted for something that will outlive the next election: the power industry’s guaranteed switch from coal to renewable energy.

What they didn’t vote for were state-owned nuclear reactors, forced delays of coal-fired power station closures and a slew of other Coalition promises widely viewed as threats to the country’s era-defining challenge of cutting harmful emissions while keeping electricity supply and prices steady.

Although times remain testing in the energy sector, a feeling of relief is clear. “The nuclear conversation is dead and buried for the foreseeable future,” said an executive at one of Australia’s biggest power suppliers, who asked not to be named. Even as the Nationals keep arguing for a nuclear future, any genuine suggestion that atomic facilities could still be built in time to replace retiring coal plants after the next election rolls around was now downright “ridiculous”, said another, adding that renewable energy was on track to surpass 60 per cent of the grid by 2028. “That’s great for the energy sector – it simplifies the path forward,” they said.

Make no mistake, a seismic shift across the grid has been well under way for years now. Australia’s coal-fired power stations – the backbone of the system for half a century – have been breaking down often and closing down earlier, with most remaining plants slated to shut within a decade.

At the same time, power station owners including AGL, Origin Energy and EnergyAustralia are joining a rush of other investors in piling billions of dollars into large-scale renewables and batteries to expand the share of their power that comes from the sun, wind and water. The federal government has an ambitious target for renewable energy to make up 82 per cent of the grid by 2030.

Moving to a system dominated by less-predictable renewables will not be easy. It will take much greater preparation to match supply and demand and require the multibillion-dollar pipeline of private investment in the transition to continue. But ousted opposition leader Peter Dutton, before losing the May 3 federal election and his own seat, hatched a plan to change the course dramatically. A grid powered mainly by renewables would never be able to “keep the lights on”, Dutton insisted.

Instead, he declared, a Coalition government would tear up Australia’s legislated 2030 emissions-reduction commitments, cut short the rollout of renewables, force the extensions of coal-fired generators beyond their owners’ retirement plans and eventually replace them with seven nuclear-powered generators, built at the taxpayer’s expense, sometime before 2050

For Australians who wanted to see urgent action to tackle climate change – and investors at the forefront of the shift to cleaner power – the campaign to dump near-term climate targets in favour of nuclear energy came at the worst possible time. Some likened it to a “near-death experience” for the momentum of the shift to a cleaner, modern energy system that would have wiped out investor confidence and killed off billions of dollars of future renewable projects.

“When you reflect on the significance of energy in the campaign, it’s reasonable to say this was a fork in the road,” said Kane Thornton, outgoing chief executive of the Clean Energy Council……………………………………………..

Dutton argued for months that nuclear plants would be the best way to keep prices down, even though almost no one agreed with him.

“I’m very happy for the election to be a referendum on energy – on nuclear,” he said.

In the end, the idea proved too toxic for voters. It delivered big swings against Dutton’s candidates in electorates chosen to host reactors, while support for Labor grew in many of the places selected to develop massive offshore wind farms, which the Coalition had planned to scrap.

The decisive election result “locks in” the government’s ambitious push for an electricity grid almost entirely powered by renewables, said Leonard Quong, the head of Australian research at BloombergNEF.

“The Labor Party’s landslide victory … is a win for climate, clean energy and the country’s decarbonisation trajectory,” he said…………………………………………..https://www.theage.com.au/business/the-economy/fork-in-the-road-how-a-failed-nuclear-plot-locked-in-australia-s-renewable-future-20250523-p5m1qa.html

June 2, 2025 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | energy