Media

Australia, the world’s largest iron ore exporter, could see its export revenues plummet by 50 per cent unless it makes an urgent shift to green iron production, according to a new report by think tank Climate Energy Finance. The report, Green Metal Statecraft: Forging Australia’s Green Iron Industry, warns that as global steelmakers transition to low-emission practices, demand for traditional, high-emission iron ore is likely to fall sharply. This shift could cause Australia’s $138 billion iron ore revenue to halve, affecting the nation’s economy and global market standing. Read more

Green energy success is helping Beijing push back against western political pressure. Xuyang Dong, a China energy policy analyst at Climate Energy Finance, an Australian think-tank, argues that China’s renewable electricity generation, backed by huge investment in the power grid and energy storage, means coal will increasingly only be used as an emergency back-up before, “inevitably”, being phased out. Read more

The election of Donald Trump – a felon and climate crisis denier – as president of the United States comes as a stroke of bitter irony after recent floods exacerbated by global warming smashed parts of the southeast US – Hurricane Milton alone is likely to cost up to US$50 billion – and given the escalating intensity of wildfires and other natural disasters taking a huge toll on America and other countries. Trump’s “drill baby, drill” energy policies are a disaster for the US, intergenerational equity and global efforts to mitigate the climate crisis. Read more

Tim Buckley speaks with Phillip Bateman on the sidelines of the IGGC annual conference Read more

Tim Buckley, founder and director of Climate Energy Finance echoed her sentiments. “My mood is that we have to have optimism – we have to look for the positives, because there’s too many negatives around. “We have to look for the massively different economic case today than existed 5 or 10 years ago. Renewables are the low cost and therefore they are the solution. We need to look for partners than are aligned in that and take the opportunity. Read more

The re-election of Donald Trump as US president – a charlatan, fool, felon and climate denier captured and paid for by the fossil fuel cartel – is a bitter irony after the devastating climate-change driven floods that smashed parts of the southeast US recently. Trump’s ‘drill baby drill’ climate and energy ‘policies’ are a disaster for the nation, for intergenerational equity and equality, and will impact global efforts to mitigate climate change. Read more

Tim Buckley said: “There’s been such a dramatic rate of technological improvement with batteries, coupled with scaling up, that any advantage other technologies may have had, to meet the evening demand peak, from five to six years ago is gone,” he said. “Batteries will do a huge amount more heavy lifting than even thought a few years ago.” Read more

As part of the USSC Debate Papers series, the Centre invited Xuyang Dong, China energy policy analyst at Climate Energy Finance, and Noah Gordon, acting co-director of the Sustainability, Climate and Geopolitics program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, to discuss whether the United States, Australia and other like-minded allies and partners should cooperate or compete with China when it comes to fighting climate change. Read more

Tim Buckley comments that “although networks across the country are “antagonising” Australians by creating “sun taxes”, a fee to export rooftop solar power into the grid during peak periods, the cost is still immaterial compared to the savings people get from their rooftops. “That antagonism and mistrust and misinformation is an issue,” he says. “But the real one is when you put rooftop solar in, your electricity use goes down by 50 per cent, so how does the grid operator maintain their compensation? The answer is increasing their charges. If you put a battery in as well, your grid use goes down by 90 per cent, so your retailer’s and transmission operator’s revenue goes down by 90 per cent. “In one respect the electrification trend is a perfect counter to that [because AEMO forecasts electricity use will rise by 30 per cent in the coming decade].” Read more

[On Caixin] China has been a world leader in investing in cleantech outside its border, too. Between January 2023 and September this year, Chinese state-owned and private companies committed more than $100 billion in foreign direct investment in relevant industries, according to the CEF. The Australia-based think tank analyzed projects that were proposed, under construction, or completed during the period in a report it released on Oct. 2. “It is a significant number considering that there are no other countries who have invested so heavily into cleantech across the world like China has,” said Dong Xuyang, an analyst of China’s energy policies at CEF. Read more

CEF published a major report on the electrification and decarbonisation of the Pilbara in August 2024, that argued that AREH could be a key part of the solution. Tim Buckley and colleague CEF Net Zero Transformation Analyst Matt Pollard, believe that AREH has the potential to act as a model for the Pilbara in how private enterprise can effectively collaborate with state and federal governments to accelerate large-scale renewable energy projects. ‘Renewable energy hubs at the scale of AREH can provide significant cost advantages over distributed, smaller-scale renewable energy projects,’ they say. Read more

Tim Buckley, told the Financial Times that “China was not just exporting its clean-tech manufacturing capacity surplus but was increasingly exporting its technology, engineering, supply chain and financing capacities.” Read more