“I can’t change the direction of the wind, but I can adjust my sails to always reach my destination.” Or so said the actor Jimmy Dean.

There are many who doubt whether Australia can meet its current official target of reaching 82% renewables by 2030, although federal Climate and Energy Minister Chris Bowen insists it still can.

One thing that seems certain, however, is that the manner of getting there, and closer to 100% renewables over the following decade, is about to get a fundamental rethink, and it could end up delivering the most significant change to the country’s renewable energy blueprint yet.

In brief, there is likely to be a step change to the Step Change scenario that has underpinned government policy for the last three years, and official planning well before that. Far from slowing it down, it could actually accelerate it.

It’s a change that has been brewing for a while – the combined impact of smart new technologies, the soaring cost of transmission, the poor management of social licence issues, and some deep analysis about the best way forward. And the rise of consumer power.

The first formal recognition of this came late last week from the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) with the release of the its Draft 2025 Electricity Network Options Report.

It’s a relatively obscure document and usually just one for the energy wonks, and was released with little fanfare.

But, as Sophie Vorrath reported on the day, it made the big admission that the building of vast new transmission lines that is the basis of its 25-year planning blueprint is getting more expensive, a lot of people don’t like it, and there are now good alternatives.

The document flags a new focus on using existing local networks for more wind, solar and storage, and on leveraging consumer energy resources – the rooftop solar, household batteries and EVs that will be bought and installed by consumers themselves.

AEMO even admitted that the next iteration of its Integrated System Plan, the planning blueprint that has become the basis of infrastructure investment and the federal government’s renewable target, will “re-visit” transmission network projects it had previously said must proceed, apart from those already committed.

The second clue came on the same day, with the announcement by the NSW Government that it wants to create the first “urban” renewable energy zone in the Illawarra – effectively an announcement that doing big wind, in this case off the coast of Wollongong, is probably a decade away, if it happens at all.

NSW Energy Minister Penny Sharpe says the urban REZ will focus on rooftop solar, including on the rooftops of industry, installing home and community batteries, supporting the uptake of EVs and moulding them to be a cheap, reliable and low emissions source of power.

“One thing that’s really grown, and I think wasn’t even envisaged even three or four years ago, is the role of consumer energy,” Sharpe said.

“So that’s rooftop solar and batteries and the role of EVs. We want to use the Illawarra as the place where we can showcase how that can all work together.

“So it’s not just about the individuals who can afford it, it’s about stabilising the grid. It’s about driving down costs, because we’re not wasting any of the solar energy… so it’s a pretty exciting change.”

Some CER advocates will suggest that the benefits of harnessing consumer resources have been evident for a bit longer than that. Be that as it may, it is now firmly part of state and federal government planning and now, thankfully, from the market operator and other key institutions too.

NSW last year launched its own household battery rebate program, and in the last federal election Bowen announced  the $2.3 billion cheaper batteries program, designed to get a million household batteries into the grid by the end of the decade across the main grid.

It’s a significant move. In the absence of a carbon price, rooftop solar has been the most effective tool in killing the business case for Australia’s aging fleet of dirty fossil fuel generators. But it has created issues of its own, and will remain a wild card for the grid if it can’t be tamed by an army of small batteries.

And the growth of consumer energy resources is possibly the best way to ensure that prices do, as promised, actually fall in the transition from coal to green energy – both for those who own and install them, and those who don’t.

The evidence so far is that it hasn’t, mostly because the new assets — wind, solar and especially storage — are largely controlled by the same companies that own and control the coal and gas assets.

The best way to break that market oligopoly, most experts realise now, is to quite literally hand the power to people, and make sure they don’t get ripped off, or feel ripped off, by the regulations and policies that manage them.

It’s such a no-brainer that it was a major surprise that the federal Coalition did not run with the idea in the last election. After all, the Nationals had been urging the “latte set” to build their own renewables rather than having them built on farming land and spoiling views.

In the end, however, the growth of rooftop solar was probably the most cogent and relatable argument against the Coalition’s commitment to nuclear baseload. If coal can’t deal with the solar duck curve, then nuclear didn’t stand a chance, as its already difficult economics depend on it being “always on".

But it’s the formal admission by AEMO on the issues of transmission, and the focus on local networks and consumer energy resources, that is the most interesting development.

The Coalition made a big deal about Labor’s plans to build 28,000 km of transmission across the Australian landscape. AEMO’s Step Change scenario, on which the 82% renewable target is based, actually contemplates only a fraction of that – just over 5000km by 2035, and 10,000km by 2050.

Those transmission lines are more or less locked in. But there’s a real chance there might not be much more, given the realisation that there is so much capacity, and so many options, already available in the grid.

The change of heart has been brought about by three things. One is the rising cost of transmission, not surprising given that civil construction costs are soaring everywhere, in virtually every industry. And the price of transmission equipment, unlike solar and batteries, is not falling, because everyone wants and needs them.

AEMO estimates that the costs have risen by up to 50%. And that seems to be borne out by the experience in the NSW portion of Australia’s biggest transmission project to date, Project Energy Connect.

The other issue is social licence. To an extent, the industry and governments have brought this on themselves. Sharpe earlier this month told the Energy Insiders podcast that she had to restructure EnergyCo, and send staff out to the regions, because some of them had “never met a farmer".

In Victoria, the transmission planning had to be brought in-house after the poor attempts to map routes across Victorian farmland caused a massive backlash that is still proving difficult to manage.

The distributed energy networks — those that manage the poles and wires linking the big transmission lines to homes and businesses — describe themselves as the “missing middle”, and point to the ability to host multiple gigawatts of wind and solar at a fraction of the cost of building new transmission.

You can listen to another relevant interview, this time with Ausgrid’s Marc England, in this episode of the Energy Insiders podcast.

Big data is also helping to change the thinking. Jack Curtis, from Neara,  has been arguing that new digital technologies underpinned by sophisticated AI and machine learning can generate highly accurate digital models of the grid, and help unlock multiple gigawatts of existing grid capacity.

“AEMO’s latest report has made one thing clear: relying solely on the necessary amount of transmission projects to be built on time and at cost to achieve energy transition goals is not realistic,” Curtis says,

“The existing network holds multiple gigawatts of untapped potential, but unlocking it requires a shift in both policy and execution. We have overlooked the next biggest opportunity in the transition tool-kit: maximising and harnessing the potential of the existing distribution network.

“To optimise this potential, Australia’s public and private sectors have to work as a collective, removing data opacity constraints that have impaired decision-making around where and how renewable generation can be efficiently introduced into the existing grid.”

Curtis has also been interviewed on Renew Economy’s Energy Insiders podcast. You can listen to  that episode hear.

However the plan is framed, social licence remains absolutely critical. Despite the best efforts of some really good renewable energy developers, it’s been poorly handled.

The worst of it has come in the management of the transmission routes, but a combination of entitled development companies, bloody-minded opposition and some appalling planning regimes have created an appalling mess – highlighted by the latest backflip by the new Queensland state LNP Government.

Even when things are done well, they can be hijacked. The Pottinger renewable energy park in south-west NSW, one of just a handful to get official access to what has become a terribly undersized renewable energy zone, had no opposition from anyone living within 15km of the project.

But it has been  railroaded by long distance mischief-makers. Most of its objectors live more than 100km away, or even interstate, forcing it to go back through the planning process, just when projects like these need to move forward.

Little wonder some developers are wary of scrutiny. One even asked Renew Economy last week to stop reporting on projects put in front of the federal government’s EPBC process because of the risks of unwanted scrutiny.

But pretending something doesn’t exist is not the answer, it’s part of the problem. Fixing the system is the answer. And that counts as much in planning permissions as it does in energy blueprints.

There is nothing wrong with getting things wrong. But, as Dean noted in the quote at the start of the article, if the wind changes direction, then there are alternatives. It will be fascinating to see how AEMO, the regulators and policy makers react to it, and the solutions they produce.

Republished from Renew Economy, 27 May 2025

The views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Pearls and Irritations.