Australia invented the solar power cell in 1983 then waved goodbye to it in 2001 as it left home for China. Embarrassingly for Australia, China turned that very same technology into an $80 billion-a-year export by 2022, dominating world supply, and still growing apace.a new $1 billion program of government support for companies to make solar cells in Australia. He’s calling it SunShot.Australia, said the prime minister, “has seen the breakthroughs that have led the world.
There’s a physical logic and a political logic to this. The physical logic is that these sites are already wired into the electricity grid; no need to build disruptive new transmission lines across farmland or through communities.The political logic is that the Coalition is busily fomenting some 50 local NIMBY-ist uprisings against proposed renewable energy projects and the power lines needed to connect them to the grid.
As political theatre, this is stirring stuff. On the same day, on the same site, a cutting-edge Australian solar cell start-up called SunDrive signed a memorandum of understanding with AGL to examine the feasibility of building a solar cell factory right there. The company’s backers include Cannon-Brookes and Malcolm Turnbull.
And that’s only one of the countries competing for the industry. “The government has to respond to the incentives on offer from the Americans’ Inflation Reduction Act, from Asia, from Canada and from Europe,” says Erwin Jackson of the Investor Group on Climate Change, representing members with $35 trillion in assets under management.
After $6.5 billion in new commitments to utility-scale projects in 2022, only $1.5 billion was committed last year, according to the Clean Energy Council. At this rate, Australia will not hit the government target of 82 per cent renewables by 2030.“There’s been no new financial commitment in Australia for the past year or so ,” says Jackson, “and that’s more about bottlenecks in transmission lines and planning approvals” – precisely because of the NIMBY-ist campaigns against new lines.