{"id":138058,"date":"2025-09-12T16:14:11","date_gmt":"2025-09-12T16:14:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/138058\/"},"modified":"2025-09-12T16:14:11","modified_gmt":"2025-09-12T16:14:11","slug":"what-donald-trump-taught-me-about-renewable-energy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/138058\/","title":{"rendered":"What Donald Trump taught me about renewable energy"},"content":{"rendered":"

I have a fun and cute personal connection with probably the single most climate-destructive individual alive today. Twelve years ago, I made an infographic that attempted to illustrate the absurd variety of symptoms attributed to \u201cwind turbine syndrome\u201d. Donald Trump found it, and posted it as proof of the harm<\/a> of wind turbines (to aid his fight against a Scottish project near one of his golf courses). When I pointed out he\u2019d missed the point, he instantly blocked me. You hurt me deep, Don.\u00a0<\/p>\n

I\u2019ll forgive him. It was a nice early education in an extremely important principle: the shotgun-blast of hollow<\/a> and ridiculous rationalisations<\/a> will constantly change, but the underlying hostility towards clean technologies will not. For the foreseeable future<\/a>, right-wing forces will deeply loathe wind and solar. The actions of the Trump administration have been swift. Recently, it issued a stop-work order on an 80% completed offshore wind farm (the developers are currently suing<\/a> to try and reverse it). This is in addition to the broader efforts<\/a> to kill clean power subsidies for wind and solar in the US.\u00a0<\/p>\n

This stuff usually takes years to show up, but there is already a clear, systemic effect occurring in the US, as recent data from Global Energy Monitor shows<\/a>. \u201cTotal solar capacity currently under construction or in pre-construction is around 92,000 MW, down from around 112,000 MW at the same developmental stages in 2024\u201d, with wind having dropped from 74,000 to 64,000 in the same period. Gas is exploding, having doubled in planned capacity from this time last year.<\/p>\n

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\n\t\t\t\t\"The\t\t\t<\/a><\/p>\n

One common talking point<\/a> featuring in the \u201cpermitting reform\u201d push (kind of a proto-\u201cabundance\u201d<\/a>) is that deregulating the energy space will, yes, allow just a teeny bit of new fossil fuels to be built, but it would also unlock massive volumes<\/a> of new wind and solar, which the free market would flock to on the grounds of their delectable cheapness. It\u2019s clear now that vision<\/a> of the future grants far too much political invulnerability to the growth of renewables, particularly to solar power. There has also been plenty of well-meaning discussion of \u201cpositive\u201d tipping points, such as societal adoption of electric vehicles, but that has been criticised<\/a> as a problematic oversimplification<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Far from being an unstoppable<\/a>, self-sustaining runaway technological revolution<\/a>, swapping dangerous fossil fuels out for safer technologies is something that will always be messy, hard and in need of persistent activist and government involvement to varying degrees. There is clearly enough baked into the global human energy system that the eventual replacement of fossil fuels with cleaner alternatives is inevitable, but it is the rate of change, not the end point, that decides exactly how screwed we are by the combustion of coal, oil and gas.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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To briefly explain this, imagine the Earth\u2019s atmosphere is a bathtub, and the more filled it becomes with water (greenhouse gases), the more we overheat. When your bathtub is on the verge of overflowing, you turn the tap off fast, whipping it closed, because you understand that your goal is stopping the flow ASAP, rather than just eventually turning the tap off at some point in the future.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve illustrated this below with some made-up numbers. Even if we reach net zero by 2050, we could cause roughly three times the damage if we take the \u201cslow path\u201d rather than the \u201cfast path\u201d. Point-in-time targets tend to obscure the sheer physical damage caused by near-term delay.<\/p>\n

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You can really see the dynamic of this urgency erasure at play in Australia\u2019s power sector. Recently, the grid regulator (the Australian Energy Market Commission, AEMC) added emissions reductions into the \u201cNational Energy Objective<\/a>\u201d (NEO). This means the regulator actually considers alignment with pre-existing climate targets in its decisions. It should be a great thing. But those targets<\/a> are almost exclusively \u201cpoint-in-time\u201d targets, meaning heel-dragging along the way, resulting in more planetary heating damage, is not considered.<\/p>\n

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Its addition also meant that in 2024, the grid planner, Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO), opted to only include in its biennial system plan (ISP) scenarios that see full achievement of each jurisdiction\u2019s climate targets, along with federal targets. The \u201cslow change\u201d scenario, for instance, was deleted, and any visualisation of emissions was also deleted. Examining the cost and consequences of a delayed transition does occur, but exclusively in the context of price and reliability. As long as we hit future targets, delays on the pathway are seen as a non-issue.<\/p>\n

Australia has had undeniable success in the rollout of renewables, and particularly with solar. What is less well-recognised is that the growth of renewable energy and the elimination of coal have both been far slower than projected or modelled by various players in the space, over the past half-decade. That has resulted in a delayed power sector transition: additional emissions along the way, which will cause irreversible harm to life.<\/p>\n

The most recent AEMO ISP assumed a likely share of renewables between 46% to 48%, for the financial year 2024-25 (FY25). The previous two editions, among various scenarios, put the same year\u2019s share between 37% up to around 55%. It ended up at 41%: lower than all of the scenarios put forth in the 2022 and 2024 editions of the ISP. These stumbles are bad enough to suggest a cause beyond seasonal variations in wind, water or solar power.<\/p>\n

\"\"Source: AEMO ISP editions 2020-2024, OpenNEM<\/p>\n

It\u2019s the same story when you look at the absolute emissions of Australia\u2019s power sector too, which seem to be falling way too slow. Rising power demand thanks to hotter fossil-fuel-intensified summers and data centre<\/a> expansionism means any new renewable energy simply serves new load instead of cutting down into fossil fuel output.<\/p>\n

\"\"Source: AEMO ISP Editions 2020-2024, OpenNEM<\/p>\n

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The latest<\/a> quarterly report from the Clean Energy Council found that \u201cjust 1,173 MW of new utility scale generation projects have been committed so far in the first half of 2025, which represents roughly one third of the run-rate required (6-7 GW per annum) for Australia to stay on track to reach its 82% renewable energy target by 2030\u201d.\u00a0<\/p>\n

There are also growing noises<\/a> from energy companies to extend the operational life of the biggest and second-biggest coal plants in Australia: Eraring (after an earlier extension<\/a>) and Bayswater<\/a>. When those debates become more prominent, the focus will be on price and reliability, and not at all on the physical harm caused by the additional planet-warming pollution they pump out.<\/p>\n

Despite the federal government\u2019s \u201cCapacity Investment Scheme\u201d, there is still nowhere near enough momentum in the growth of new wind and solar in Australia. The two biggest retailers, AGL Energy and Origin, shoulder much of the blame \u2014 while their aging coal plants drop offline, they haven\u2019t been building out replacement energy in their portfolio:\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"\"Source: National Greenhouse Energy Reporting scheme<\/a><\/p>\n

\"\"Source: National Greenhouse Energy Reporting scheme<\/a><\/p>\n

There is definitely no magic cure for shifting Australia\u2019s power grid back to a reasonable trajectory. The messy \u201cmid-transition<\/a>\u201d challenge is emerging in power sectors around the world. But whatever mix of active, aggressive and urgent actions need to be taken, they simply won\u2019t exist without the acknowledgement that hot-swapping the country\u2019s single largest interconnected machine in an overheating atmosphere (and overheating geopolitics) requires sustained, unending effort, alongside broader recognition that short-term delay does real damage.<\/p>\n

Fossil-owning power companies will shake their heads sadly at the lack of progress, shrug and say something along the lines of \u201cwe\u2019ve tried nothing and we\u2019re all out of ideas\u201d. By deprioritising human agency and the range of possible futures, they use determinism as a type of climate delay; something I call \u201cpredatory fatalism<\/a>\u201c. They have always sought to present<\/a> the rapid replacement of fossil fuels as impossible, and they have always been catastrophically wrong (such as their insistence the 2010s-era \u201cRenewable Energy Target\u201d was impossible to meet, when it was comfortably exceeded). That they\u2019ve been so shockingly wrong in the past seems to have no bearing on their perceived expertise<\/a> on what\u2019s impossible.\u00a0<\/p>\n

It is a refreshingly optimistic thing to observe. The skeptics, doubters and fatalists have been proven wrong. We are not bound to fossil fuels. But we are bound to the fact that there is no deterministic fate for this shift.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"I have a fun and cute personal connection with probably the single most climate-destructive individual alive today. Twelve…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":138059,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[64,63,46520,68,2490,75,8666,8146,128,94828,6831,56262,3814],"class_list":{"0":"post-138058","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-environment","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-clean-energy-council","11":"tag-climate-change","12":"tag-donald-trump","13":"tag-environment","14":"tag-fossil-fuels","15":"tag-renewable-energy","16":"tag-science","17":"tag-solar-energy-projects","18":"tag-solar-power","19":"tag-wind-farms","20":"tag-wind-power"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/138058","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=138058"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/138058\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/138059"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=138058"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=138058"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=138058"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}