Driving a sustainable future for Australia through our
Our energy transition lead partners share their views
Our speakers
Lachy Haynes
Partner, Energy Transition
Driving a sustainable future for Australia through our energy transition
Australia’s energy transition is becoming more urgent as our nation seeks to meet its decarbonisation targets, with a particular focus on the global role we can play due to our unique reserves of critical minerals. PwC’s experts talk about the opportunities in the Federal Budget to accelerate the transition to renewable energy sources.
Transcript
Varya Davidson, Partner and Energy Transition Leader, ESG Strategy & Transformation
The conversation about energy transition in Australia has taken on a particular urgency, given the short time we have left to prevent the worst impacts of climate change combined with a growing understanding of the significance of the challenge ahead of us.
Energy transition will require action and investment from government, state, and federal, as well as the measures put in place to stimulate private sector investment and provide much needed certainty. The budget will play a really important role on both of these fronts.
To meet our national de-carbonisation targets, we need wind and solar energy capacity equivalent to 40 times that of the current national electricity market. We need to install efficiently 10,000 km of new transmission lines, and we need to do it all in record time. To give you a sense of how fast things are moving, globally, investment in the energy transition topped a record AUD 1 trillion last year. That's 31% up on 2021, and is expected to increase to AUD 4 trillion annually over the next five years.
Lachy Haynes, Partner, Energy Transition
Critical minerals are absolutely crucial to the production and performance of those low carbon technologies that we'll be relying on, so think solar, wind, electrolysers, lithium ion batteries. and so critical minerals, it'll be reasonable to say critical minerals will make or break the energy transition.
The government has a great opportunity in the forthcoming budget to really address this issue head on. How do we make more critical minerals available quicker, and to what extent are we going to value add onshore and start developing our sovereign capability, start securing our energy independence?
Come budget night, the government has already flagged a major election promise, which was the National Reconstruction Fund, setting that up, and they've allocated AUD 15billion to seed that fund.
One of the seven funds within the National Reconstruction Fund is Value adding in resources fund. There'll be a lot of attention and a lot of interest from the critical minerals industry and those activities downstream from critical minerals extraction in what their fund will be set up to deliver and where the money will go.
