Media

The projected deflation of Australia’s export earnings is a lens to threats to our future economic resilience and security, while our key trading partners accelerate their economic decarbonisation and deliver on their Paris Agreement commitments. It is a stark reminder of the need to increase our economic complexity, to diversify from fossil fuels, which face inevitable structural decline, and to prioritise value adding our resources. The projections underscore the strategic importance, for example, to pivot to green iron production rather than shipping rocks of ore. Read more

The key problem is that Snowy Hydro has built 7 new fossil fuel generation projects since the turn of this century, but has not built a single wind, solar or BESS project. The Snowy board is failing to align with and drive the Federal Government’s ambitious electricity decarbonisation agenda, nor build the replacement generation capacity we need to lower power prices for all. Read more

Dartbrook Mine, an underground thermal coal joint venture in the Hunter Valley, had sat empty since 2006 until it was revived at the end of last year. Its owner, ASX-listed Australian Pacific Coal, last month failed to meet its obligations for a $174 million loan to key backer Vitol, a Singapore-based commodities giant. Australian Pacific Coal has now called in administrators from Deloitte and requested an “immediate” trading suspension on the stock market. Vitol has since appointed receivers, insolvency firm FTI Consulting, to claw back its millions. Read more

Have Australian CBAM enthusiasts been dreaming too small? Is an Asian CBAM the secret sauce for clean trade in our region? Have Frankie and Luke now read enough CBAM papers to level up and get a CBAM merit badge? Tennant licks his lips as your intrepid hosts devour a new report from Climate Energy Finance, ‘A Price On Carbon: Building Towards an Asian CBAM’. While this wasn’t necessarily the CBAM paper we were looking for, authors Matt Pollard and Tim Buckley make carbon pricing padawans of us all – and maybe all those DFAT folks who need to use the force to sell this idea – and give us the basic commands for a future Asian CBAM Read more

The Bonaparte CCS project is owned by Inpex, Woodside and TotalEnergies, which want to store captured carbon dioxide under the seabed on a site about 250km offshore from Darwin from 2030. Science and industry minister Tim Ayres awarded major project status to the CCS project and the Northern Silica project, and extended the status to Mike Cannon-Brookes’ Sun Cable project and the Broken Hill cobalt blue project, as part of the federal government’s effort to modernise the country’s energy system. Read more

Tim Buckley, director of think tank Climate Energy Finance (CEF), who spoke exclusively with ESN Premium ahead of the launch of the scheme, believes it will likely make Australia a “red-hot market” for new energy storage systems and help build out local supply chains. Read more

In China, more wind turbines and solar panels were installed last year than in the rest of the world combined. And China’s clean energy boom is going global. Chinese companies are building electric vehicle and battery factories in Brazil, Thailand, Morocco, Hungary and beyond. Read more

“Just staggering,” wrote Tim Buckley, head of Climate and Energy Finance. “China installed 92.9GW of solar and 26.3GW of wind in just the month on May 2025! “ Before we get too excited, there is a pull-forward on installs with a national strategic policy change on renewables that took effect from June 2025 – so we see a real risk of a significant slowdown for the rest of 2025. Read more

The weekend saw a seismic escalation in the conflict in the Middle East, as the US bombed Iran’s key uranium enrichment facilities. This followed Israel’s campaign of military intervention on the justification that Iran must be prevented from developing nuclear capabilities. The situation represents a dramatic increase in geopolitical instability in the region – a key source of global fossil fuel energy production and exports – and has potentially dire consequences for worldwide energy markets and economies dependent on imports for their energy needs. Australia is one such economy. Read more

China leads the world by a huge and growing margin across almost all of the frontiers of our decarbonised future, from sophisticated clean tech manufacturing to domestic renewable energy installations to foreign direct investment into the energy transition. In April alone, China installed over 45GW of solar power capacity, more than Australia’s entire solar fleet. Read more

The Highlights * Tim’s TED X Sydney * Net-Zero Export Target Proposal: ANU’s Frank Jotzo and Annette Zou * Heavy Equipment Decarbonisation: BHP signs MoU with China’s XCMG * China’s Cleantech Outbound Investment (OFDI): China building cleantech infrastructure abroad (e.g., 10GWh EV battery plant in France for Renault). $170B tracked in cleantech OFDI since 2023 Read more

On a recent delegation, I saw the futuristic factory of solar giant Longi in Jiaxing, with its omnipresent robots, combining automation, big data, AI and 5G to flexibly customise solar module components for diverse application scenarios and customers, revolutionising advanced manufacturing at massive scale. This is not an isolated case. China leads the world by a huge and growing margin across almost all of the frontiers of our decarbonised future, from sophisticated clean tech manufacturing to domestic renewable energy installations to foreign direct investment into the energy transition. Read more