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The Prime Minister has spent much of the day trying to guarantee the future of Australia’s critically important exports to China’s steel industry, wrapping up a high-level roundtable on green steel in Shanghai. Australian coal and iron ore exports have fuelled China’s construction boom and underwritten Australian prosperity for years, pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into the budget. But as China’s steel industry moves to decarbonise — as well as diversifying its imports and winding down production — Australia’s long resources boom faces an uncertain future. Read more

Caroline Wang from Clean Energy Finance, a think tank, highlighted that China leads the world by a “staggering margin” when it comes to many energy transition sectors, such as electric vehicles and solar panels. She told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation that for Australia to meet its emission reduction targets and build a green industrial capacity, China will be an essential partner as Australia needs access to Chinese technology and Chinese industrial capability. Read more

Highlights Our first highlight – the Capacity Investment Scheme. South Australia’s high RE % record Green Steel subsidies from South Korea US invests MP Materials a US Rare Earths materials Read more

“Griffin Coal continues to operate at below gross cashflow breakeven, such that it is struggling to pay for equipment maintenance and the interest let alone have scope to repay the capital on $A600-800 million of debts outstanding against the local Australian entity,” energy analyst Tim Buckley wrote at the time. Read more

Caroline Wang from Climate Energy Finance says China will be an indispensable partner China leads the world in renewable energy deployment and all other aspects of the energy transition by staggering margin in the two days in may this year China installed an amount of renewables that is astralia installed in the whole of 2024 she says labour’s ambitions to boost the green manufacturing will also depend on collaboration with China we need access to Chinese technology and Chinese industrial capability to do that that’s the kind of chronic pragmatic collaboration that is already happening in other parts of the world it’s a difficult balancing act which isn’t going to get any easier. Read more

She says that means China will be indispensable to reducing emissions in Australia, and to the government’s ambitions to build its own green industrial capacity through the Future Made in Australia plan. “We need access to Chinese technology and Chinese industrial capability in order to do that,” Ms Wang says. “That’s the kind of pragmatic cooperation that’s already happening in other parts of the world and that Australia can look to.” Read more

Tim Buckley, founder and director of Climate Energy Finance, says progressive cuts to feed-in-tariffs are “the logical end-point” for Australia’s rooftop solar success story. “Expecting to be paid for electricity exports when they are worse [than] worthless is ill-informed. Why should a renter or apartment dweller subsidised the richer home owners?” he writes in a LinkedIn post on the subject this week. But Buckley says moving to a “Sun Tax” is exactly that – “demanding the poor subsidise the better off.” There are better ways to ensure the grid is not flooded with excess solar during the middle of the day. Read more

The government’s $32 billion green bank says Labor’s net zero targets will be put out of reach in sectors such as aviation and long-haul trucking unless the government turbocharges investment in locally made low-carbon fuels. Read more

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