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A climate think tank says WA’s emissions reduction plans must go further to decarbonise the Pilbara, the state’s largest greenhouse gas emitter. The state government yesterday committed to a 75 per cent renewable energy target for WA’s main electricity grid, the South West Interconnected System, by 2031. Read more

Western Australia will rely on major new wind projects to underpin an ambitious green energy target for its main power grid, but business has warned that the plan will not reduce power prices enough to save manufacturing and minerals processing in the state. Read more

“This is a strong, historic move forward for Western Australia – a floor, not a ceiling – and a meaningful signal to investors and industry, and we congratulate the WA government on this key step. If achieved, all coal generation will be replaced by renewables by 2030/31, and we will see a material decline in gas generation, critical progress in line with the climate science. In that light, it was great to visit one of the two massive BESS yesterday in the historic coal region of Collie WA – the two largest operating batteries in the world today. Read more

Climate Energy Finance (CEF) director, Tim Buckley, said this is a strong, historic move forward for Western Australia and a meaningful signal to investors and industry. “If achieved, all coal generation will be replaced by renewables by 2030/31, and we will see a material decline in gas generation, critical progress in line with climate science,” he said. Buckley said the government also needs to leverage the power of WA’s mining industry to work towards a renewables strategy for the Pilbara focused on electrification and decarbonisation. Read more

Western Australia has come a long way since 2012 when its then state energy minister opened the country’s first large scale solar farm at Greenough River near Geraldton and vowed never to open another one. He didn’t. But the Liberal state government has been moved on, Labor brought an end of a lengthy renewable investment drought and on Tuesday set a formal target of 75 per cent renewables by 2030/31, by which time it has vowed to close the last of the state owned coal generators at Collie, with the one privately owned generator also likely to close. Read more

This month, in a landmark ruling, the High Court upheld the NSW Court of Appeal’s invalidation of approval for extension of MACH Energy’s Mount Pleasant coal mine in the NSW Hunter Valley. This extension would have doubled the mine’s production to 21 million tonnes a year, producing a total of 870 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent emissions, roughly twice Australia’s annual emissions. Yet another massive Australian-supplied climate bomb as the world hurtles towards climate catastrophe. Read more

Energy analyst Tim Buckley, from Climate Energy Finance, said the night operations shutdown would not cause rolling blackouts. Read more

That marks a change from two years ago. In its 2024 financial results, Fortescue named China a “core market” and pointed to the country’s “insatiable demand for green products” as it set out plans for an integrated Australia-China green metals supply chain. Other voices in the sector shared that view. Tim Buckley, director of Climate Energy Finance, told PV Tech Premium last year that “the single biggest opportunity for Australia is to enhance and pivot our relationship with China”, arguing that exporting green iron instead of raw ore would also diversify the mining workforce. Read more

It comes as the federal government works to establish a framework that would require data centres to bring as much power into the electricity grid as they take. Australia’s largest proposed data centre could draw a quarter of Queensland’s energy use a model of a data centre The proposed $30 billion data centre in Queensland has a peak capacity comparable to the average power requirements of 1.5 million households. But who pays for that power production was a dilemma, according to Climate Energy Finance director Tim Buckley. Read more

Last week, in a landmark ruling the High Court upheld the NSW Court of Appeal’s invalidation of approval for extension of MACH Energy’s Mount Pleasant coal mine in the NSW Hunter Valley. Read more

A powerful coalition of industry, investor, climate, legal and public interest groups has declared that data centres must “Bring Your Own New Clean Energy” or households and businesses will pay. The rules must apply to all data centres in the development pipeline (including in the NT and QLD), bring genuinely new renewable energy online within three years of operation, and limit the role of offsets. Read more

Climate Energy Finance director Tim Buckley says while he has no problem with setting up rehabilitation bonds for renewables, he questions why the new industry should be held to a much higher level of account than the mining industry, “which for 200 years has got away with doing next to no rehabilitation.” “Governments have only taken responsibility for end of life assets because the fossil fuel industry has been brilliant at outsourcing that. “The fact that rehabilitation is only set at a quarter of the cost, is a failure to hold that industry to account.” “The mining industry has been exempt from polluter pays.” Buckley compares Vast Solar’s solar thermal site in New South Wales (NSW), yet to be cleaned up after a fire tore through it 10 months ago because liquidators are still untangling the assets, with coal mines intentionally shuttered years ago by viable companies that remain toxic pits. Read more