Australia’s renewable energy transition is being made more expensive by poor planning, fragmented market structures and ideological battles, when what is needed is a slower, more technically grounded assessment of how to keep the grid reliable and affordable.

Energy Minister Chris Bowen was recently reported (AFR 4 June) as being open to re-nationalising “a large chunk of the energy grid.”

The plan, put forward by the Electrical Trades Union (ETU), proposes supplying cheap, subsidised power for heavy industry as an alternative to bailouts, like those made or proposed for the Boyne and Tomago aluminium smelters.

Any proposal to guide or plan what is often represented as Australia’s current blundering and blinkered transition to renewable electricity generation should be welcomed.

A recent critic of the transition was former head of the Energy Security Board, Kerry Schott. Schott called for an AI-powered rethink of the delayed and over-budget build-out of the nation’s electricity grid after pointing to billions of dollars’ worth of blowouts.

Last year it was reported that the cost of building NSW’s first Renewable Energy Zone had blown out from $650 million to $5.5 billion over five years.

The Australian government has a target of 82 per cent renewable electricity by 2030. The nation’s two largest electricity grids – the NEM (eastern and central states) and the SWIS (Western Australia) – now source 35 per cent to 40 per cent of electricity from renewables.

Concerns about costs blowouts are exacerbated by the fact that to fully replace fossil fuel generation, Australia’s renewable capacity must be oversized by three to five times the baseline demand. This massive overbuild – alongside substantial investments in long-duration storage – is required to cover peak demand periods during times when variable wind and solar generation are low or non-existent.

Further cost – and fraying of community support for the rollout – is caused by the need to build expensive new transmission lines to link this renewable generation to users. For example, the cost of the NSW section of the new interconnector to South Australia blew out by over $1 billion with the owner, Transgrid, expecting to recoup the........

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