Media

Danish firm Orsted has launched a lawsuit against the administration this week for preventing work on its offshore wind project when it was 80 per cent complete. The market instability is making companies rethink investments in the technology, Climate Energy Finance director Tim Buckley says. “We’ve just had a reality check from Trump destroying offshore wind in the US,” he says. “Offshore wind is going to be a very financially challenged proposition here in Australia.” Read more

Tim Buckley, energy analyst at Climate Energy Finance, explains the strategic importance of a new rare earth discovery amid the global shift to renewables. Rare earths, though niche, are critical for technologies like EVs and wind turbines. China dominates global supply, making non-Chinese sources like Australia vital, especially during US-China trade tensions. The Australian government may support viable projects for sovereign capability. However, environmental concerns exist due to radioactivity and mining impacts, raising questions about social and geopolitical consequences. Read more

The exposé accuses Climate Energy Finance of proposing something truly radical – capping mining fuel tax breaks and redirecting the savings to renewable energy. The evidence of foreign manipulation? A decade-old university donation, a couple of routine business partnerships and the apparently treasonous act of acknowledging that China manufactures solar panels. Welcome to McCarthyism for the climate age, where any policy that trims fossil profits gets recast as Beijing’s master plan. The guilt-by-association game begins with CEF’s supposed “partners linked to the Chinese Government”. Read more

China is electrifying its economy at breakneck speed. That includes transportation – cars, trucks, trains, buses, etc. – that Canada is counting on as a new market for its oil exports. There’s more bad news for Alberta: other Asian countries are copying China’s energy model. Read more

In 2022 the Albanese government set aside $20 billion for its ‘Rewiring the Nation’ fund, to upgrade Australia’s electricity grid. In August 2023, the federal government signed a deal for $3 billion of that money to be set aside for Western Australian projects. But the Clean Energy Finance Corporation has confirmed to the ABC not a single dollar has been allocated to specific projects under that deal. Read more

China is home to half of the world’s solar, half of the world’s wind power and half of the world’s electric cars. “In the month of April alone, 45.2GW of solar was added, more than Australia’s total cumulative solar power capacity,” Caroline Wang said. “China’s renewable capacity has exponentially increased and that has also contributed to the drop in coal, in coal use and emissions. There is now a structural kind of decline of coal.” That’s already having an impact on emissions. Read more

Highlights Australia’s Federal Senate Disinformation inquiry ARENA award to Calix $45m Allegra Spender Productivity and Tax Roundtable Lowlights Lithium Hydroxide Refinery Write-off by IGO Main Story The Race to 82% Renewables AEMO’s Quarterly Energy Dynamics 2QCY2025 Methane gas generation plays an important but small and progressively declining role 25% upscaling of the CIS Big BESS News What’s coming up? CEF hoping Minister Bowen will go the top end of the CCA’s 65-75% reduction target. Australia is yet to win the presidency of #COP31, if we do, that will be a key priority for CEF’s Caroline Wang over the coming 15 months. Read more

It will be of a Barnaby Joyce sideshow in a parliamentary corridor in which he announced he would introduce a private member’s bill to dump Australia’s goal to reach net zero by 2050. Joyce and his former political foe Michael McCormack had apparently arrived in Canberra having cooked up a plan to carve up the spoils of the Coalition’s comprehensive election loss. “This is a hell of crowd,” Joyce chirped as he lobbed up to the press pack he had gathered. He gave three main reasons for dumping the target, all of which are wrong. Read more

The unexpected landslide victory for Australia’s Labor Prime Minister Anthony Albanese for a second term is good news for global climate action and a strong endorsement of America’s move to clean energy and former President Joe Biden’s $1.2 trillion Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), despite efforts by Trump to dismantle it. Read more

At the public meeting organised by SPA on 26 April, Tim Buckley, director of Climate Energy Finance (CEF), made the following points: – CEF acts on the basis of climate science, and the last 11 years were the warmest on record – The world invested US$2.1 trillion in cleantech in 2024, over 11% year on year – The boom in solar and wind pushed the world past 40% clean electricity in 2024 Read more

Republished from RENEW ECONOMY, 7 May 2025 Tim Buckley, from Climate Energy Finance, says that with Labor returned to government, it is time to “grasp this moment of policy certainty” and use it to build investor confidence, crowding-in domestic and foreign financial capital at scale to underpin our transition. Read more

“Without customers, suppliers and governments working together to a common time-frame, these projects aren’t going to get built, and that’s why we’ve seen so many announcements in the press of companies going bankrupt because they can’t do the capital raising anymore, or projects being slowed right down” Read more