Media

Tim Buckley breaks down why we have seen massive power price spikes in the NEM – coal’s unreliability, system gaming by gentailers and the failure of the approvals system to bring firmed renewables replacement capacity online Read more

Tim Buckley on ABC News: China is installing record amounts of solar and wind, and is building a modern and flexible power system at world-leading speed and scale. Read more

Multinational metals giant Fortescue has confirmed it has put green hydrogen plans for the NSW Upper Hunter on the backburner. Director of energy industry think tank Climate Energy Finance, Tim Buckley, said he understood why FFI had backed away from the Liddell idea after conducting the feasibility study. He said Mr Forrest was ambitious in thinking the project, and other FFI green hydrogen projects, could take off so quickly. Mr Buckley said the technology for green hydrogen was still lagging behind in many respects, especially in the large cost of exporting hydrogen from Australia to the world. “[The technology] is yet to be commercialised, and I say that in terms of production but more importantly in terms of international transportation,” he said. “The cost of the transportation is prohibitive and it’s in fact not even commercially viable at this point in time, and won’t be for another decade.” Read more

Fortescue put green hydrogen partnership with AGL at former Liddell coal power station on the back-burner. Tim Buckley told Michael Condon on ABC NSW Country Hour that Twiggy Forest has scaled back his green energy ambition, and focus on WA and the Pilbara, getting the technology right first before expanding its other parts of Australia. Read more

Climate Energy Finance director Tim Buckley said Fortescue chief Andrew Forrest was not alone in betting big on green hydrogen as part of the energy transition but costs had, in fact, gone up instead of following the usual pattern of better affordability for clean technology such as batteries, solar panels and electric vehicles. “Twiggy went way too hard, way too fast and way too hyped about hydrogen,” Mr Buckley said. “Australia put out like 50 per cent of the world’s press releases of hydrogen in the last five years but none of them have come to fruition.” With Australian coal and gas exports to decline as the world decarbonises, Mr Buckley expressed doubt green hydrogen would be able to fill the void, pointing out the first ship capable of transporting chilled hydrogen at scale is at least 10 years away. He said green hydrogen’s value was helping Australian resources companies to pivot to value-adding, such as processing critical minerals and producing strategic metals such as green steel. Read more

[On THE EXPRESS TRIBUNE]: A report by Sydney-based think tank Climate Energy Finance (CEF) said China was installing renewables so rapidly it would meet its end-of-2030 target by the end of this month — or 6.5 years early. China accounts for about a third of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions. A recent drop in emissions (the first since relaxing COVID-19 restrictions), combined with the decarbonisation of the power grid, may mean the country’s emissions have peaked. “With the power sector going green, emissions are set to plateau and then progressively fall towards 2030 and beyond,” CEF China energy policy analyst Xuyang Dong said. Read more

China is installing record amounts of solar and wind, while scaling back once-ambitious plans for nuclear. “We’ve seen America under President Biden throw a trillion dollars on the table [for clean energy],” CEF director Tim Buckley said. “China’s response to that has been to double down and go twice as fast.” “With the power sector going green, emissions are set to plateau and then progressively fall towards 2030 and beyond,” CEF China energy policy analyst Xuyang Dong said. Read more

Last month, Australia’s Smart Energy Council took a delegation to China to visit renewable factories and the Shanghai New Energy Conference, an event that drew half a million delegates. The group visited an EV manufacturer and saw two lines of production, each spitting out a completed EV every 36 seconds. The SEC’s delegation including Tim Buckley, founder of Climate Energy Finance, a renewable energy consultancy, speaks of standing in a solar module manufacturing factory owned by TW Solar and gazing down a long corridor, unable to make out its end in the distance. “I saw a long wall, half a kilometre long, of manufacturing lines and not a worker in sight. It was all robots.” Read more

Beijing rolls out huge investment to upgrade transmission system as shift from coal piles pressure on creaking grid. “The current level of spending is not catching up with how fast China’s solar and wind new capacity additions are growing,” said Xuyang Dong, a China energy analyst at think-tank Climate Energy Finance. Power needed for artificial intelligence, data centres and electric vehicles are accelerating a longer-term rise in electricity’s share of energy use — up from 12 per cent in 2006 to 19 per cent in 2023, Dong noted. Read more

On Straits Times: By the end of July, China is predicted to reach a 2030 target to install 1,200 gigawatts (GW) of wind and solar capacity, said a forecast by Climate Energy Finance (CEF), a Sydney-based think-tank, on July 2. Given the scale and impact of everything China does, achieving the 1,200GW target will act like a gravitational pull, said Ms Xuyang Dong, a China energy policy analyst at CEF and the report’s lead author. “It will incentivise other great powers to go faster in this global technology and investment race-to-the-top renewable energy competition, which will be good news for the world,” she told ST. Read more

As China rapidly shifts its energy mix to new sources of power like wind and solar, its electricity grid is struggling to keep up – can deep reforms help rewire the system? Due to China’s electrification of seemingly everything – in particular, an explosion in the manufacture, export and adoption of electric vehicles (EVs) – as well as its quest to maintain economic growth, the country added 9.2 gigawatts of new thermal power capacity to the grid in the first four months of the year, while its thermal power generation increased 5.9 per cent year-on-year, according to Dong Xuyang, China energy policy analyst at Climate Energy Finance. “Given increasing electricity demand, it is critical for China to reform the power system to sustainably lower wind and solar curtailment rates, increase zero-emissions power plant utilisation rates, reform the energy trading system and improve grid connectivity ….to decouple from the need for thermal power as a backup resource to ensure energy security,” said Dong of the Sydney-based think tank. Read more

EdF, which is now fully government owned after facing potential bankruptcy due to delays and massive cost over-runs at its latest generation large scale nuclear plants, had reportedly been working on a new design for SMRs for the last four years. Tim Buckley, from Climate and Energy Finance, seized on the news and called on Opposition leader Peter Dutton and energy spokesman Ted O’Brien to provide more details of their nuclear plans beyond the one page press release they released last month. “Come’on guys, how naive do you take the average Australian voter for?” Buckley wrote. “In your alternate fact world, who do you think will pay for the permanent around 50% increase in Australian energy prices for consumers? Are you really intent on destroying the international competitiveness of Australian industry purely in the service of your fossil fuel funders?” Read more