Researching energy and defence. Physics and data science background. Happy getting into the weeds.
Sydney, New South Wales
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This is the story of how a fund chaired by former Labor PM Julia Gillard acquired a wind farm project just six days before Labor Energy Minister Chris Bowen underwrote its future revenues with taxpayer money.
Today we've learned Julia's fund is trying to flip it. For a profit.
HMC Capital's 'Energy Transition Fund' rushed to acquire the Neoen Victoria portfolio. They hadn't even raised any money in their fund. They closed with almost a billion dollars worth of borrowed money and IOU's.
Less than a week later, Chris Bowen announced Kentbruck Wind Farm to be successful in the first round of the Capacity Investment Scheme. My rough calculations suggest they will receive something like a billion dollars from taxpayers (and maybe much more) over 15 years.
Sweet deal. A billion dollars of fancy financial monopoly money one week. A billion dollars of promised taxpayer dollars the next.
I want to emphasise that I have no evidence of anything illegal or improper taking place. Rather, I want to point out how odious and repugnant the official, proper, legal business of renewable energy has become.
Yesterday Chris Bowen announced he wanted to supersize the CIS subsidy scheme, yet again.
Today Ross Garnaut seemed to cheer this on, whilst pointing out "There are now virtually no new investment commitments for solar and wind generation that do not have CIS or other Government underwriting,"
What happened to a sense of propriety? Since when do we celebrate people rushing to put their snouts in the trough? Or rushing to fill the trough even higher?
Unlike the UK who publish a 'going rate' for technology subsidies, our renewables are subsidised through a secret tender process. Every project gets to ask for whatever revenue they want to proceed. @AEMO_Energy facilitates a secret beauty pageant, where they award points for things like indigenous participation or community engagement, alongside financial value.
And Chris Bowen makes the final call.
The bids remain secret. There's no cap to the pay-outs. Since AEMO is a private company, there is no scope for an FOI request, and AEMO aren't not subject to parliamentary oversight through Senate Estimates.
So no-one can ever prove an allegation that Bowen has bestowed special favour on a friend's project if that was what he did. But equally, he can never prove that he selected strictly according to merit. We are just expected to trust the black-box of Bowen's subsidies.
So I'm going to say out loud, with full voice, that I hope everyone can agree on:
If this is what the future of 'clean energy' looks like in Australia, it looks absolutely FILTHY.
Any firm that talks about ESG seriously should start taking the "G" a bit more seriously and steer clear of projects that thrust their snouts into Bowen's hopelessly opaque, bottomless trough of government funds.
Or at the very least, purge their boards and senior leadership of all the former Labor staffers, donors, and industry lobbyists who have had a hand in designing the trough, and filling it up.
The reality is that there are no natural profits to be made in generating renewable electricity in Australia.
Every dollar of profit in this industry is really a cheque signed by a politician, with Chris Bowen signing all the biggest cheques, worth untold billions, in the next three years.
It's all legal. It's all official. And it's absolutely obscene.
Mega-thread below.
(It'll come in stages)
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The most important imperative for Australia is to….
Tame inflation?
Get real wages growing?
Make housing affordable?
Bring down energy prices?
Control government spending?
Secure fuel supplies?
Oh no… silly me.
“get rid of diesel”
The most important imperative for Australia is to get rid of diesel. It is a no brainer for the economy, for national security and the environment. But there is no policy
reneweconomy.com.au/australi…
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Aidan Morrison retweeted
Why Net-Zero Will TANK Aussie AI | @FootnotesGuy
#artificialintelligence #ai #datacentre #energy #renewableenergy #diesel
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We haven't "surged past 50%". We've crept past 45%.
Over last three years, we've added just 2.7% per year.
At current rates, we won't hit 50% for nearly two years, possibly after the next federal election.
So I can't let this slide.
One of my jobs as an energy researcher is battling misinformation, which distorts public debate, and presenting true facts in context.
See below my letter to the dedicated energy reporter at @australian, Colin Packham, asking for this '50%' howler to be corrected.
Sadly Colin has already indicated to me he's to busy to update today, and that he was actually aware that his 50% number was the peak of a seasonal, fluctuating quarterly number, not a sustainable annual average.
So please share and comment widely enough to make sure those in charge of our major newspapers realise that this kind of misinformation is unacceptable, and needs to be called out.
Dear Colin,
I'd like to request a correction to factually inaccurate and misleading headlines and content in today's Australian in the "Energy Nation" feature:
"Renewables push past 50pc but next phase proves harder"
"Renewables surge past 50pc but the next phase proving harder"
As well as further incorrect claims in your article:
"Renewable energy has breached 50% of electricity generation in the national market, a significant advance on a year ago and a major step towards Labor's target of 82%"
"Australia's 50 per cent renewable milestone therefore comes at an awkward moment."
This claim is misleading, and factually unsubstantiated. If this was a claim made by any person of public note at Energy Nation Forum, please let me know, and I will pursue a correction and acknowledgement of the mistake from whichever organisation that person belongs to. But if it is your own (as I can find no attribution in your writing, so I assume that it is) I would kindly request a correction published in The Australian, proportionate to the prominence afforded to this article associated headlines.
The source of your confusion might possibly be from headlines published by AEMO claiming more than half was generated from renewables in a single quarter (Q4 2025), which I link below. The highest quarterly number that can be attributed to an authoritative source is 50.1%, see page 22 of the Quarterly Energy Dynamics report, also linked.
However, if you inspect other such quarterly reports prior to or after that one, you'll realise that this is an outlier due to seasonal fluctuation. The 4th Quarter consistently achieves some of the highest renewable share, and a 50% share has never been sustained over 12 months. A convenient means of viewing these statistics, derived from AEMO data, is to use the tracking tool in the OpenElectricity.org.au website, where you'll find that the quarters prior to and since that single quarter range from the high 30s (eg Q2 2025 at 37.4%) through to the high 40s (eg Q1 2026 at 46.1%).
Given the very large seasonal fluctuation that is expected between quarters, the proper basis for assessing milestones for renewable energy penetration must include 12 sequential months. Assessed again using OpenElectricity, this could be the last calendar year at 43%, the last financial year at 44.9%, or the last 365 days up to 23rd of September, at 45.3%. But to claim "renewables surge past 50%", and make direct reference to this as progress towards government targets like 82% which must be assessed on an annual basis, it is a fundamental and serious misrepresentation of the facts. Your article and headlines claims a rate of progress that has no basis in reality.
Since FY 2023, when the renewable share was 36.8% to the close of FY 2026 when we had 44.9%, renewable share has grown by just 2.7% on average per year. Therefore, it is most likely that at the current rate of progress, the 50% milestone which your article claims has been achieved will still not be achieved at the time of the next federal election campaign.
For major media outlets with prominent standing in the energy debate to establish in the public mind that such a milestone is already behind us is a serious disservice to debate.
I therefore request an immediate and clear correction to the articles and headlines in proportion to the prominence given.
Please find links to sources below:
explore.openelectricity.org.…
aemo.com.au/newsroom/media-r…
aemo.com.au/-/media/files/ma…
Sincerely,
Aidan Morrison
theaustralian.com.au/special…
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This is the most damning and outrageous draft-final change in the latest ISP.
In the draft, just Stage 1, ie one 500KV line, modelled to New England.
Ongoing analysis and stakeholder engagement needed "to ascertain whether the second stage will optimise benefits to consumers..."
Crystal clear that AEMO knows full well that there are no projects likely to close in the REZ, and this will be a white-elephant, with terrible costs imposed on consumers with no chance of proportional benefit.
So what happened with the analysis and stakeholder engagement?
Well, one stakeholder trumped all others. The NSW government wrote and declared that they're doing both lines, in a single project, and asked for it to be treated as 'anticipated' which makes it a sunk-cost in the ISP, so AEMO would not do any further analysis on whether it makes economic sense for consumers.
The sheer bloody-mindedness of this move is just breathtaking.
There can be no pretense now that the ISP does anything at all to coordinate investment or protect consumers.
A supremely arrogant government can just over-rule the community, and consumer interests, and the ISP just nods along, puts it all in the path called 'optimal'. 1/
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Here's Penny's letter.
Interpreted: "damn the costs, damn the consumers, damn the communities, damn the consultation, I'm doing it anyway, bugger off AEMO stop putting your nose into it."
She does this by attempting to tick boxes on planning, contracts, and authorisation, which conform with the "anticipated" status that means AEMO doesn't check the economics, optimal timing, size etc ever again. 2/
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🤩🤓 Can't describe the explosive nerd-out excitement at seeing this incredible family tree, of jets.
I read a brilliant book a while back that covered the early lineage of the Rolls Royce family in exquisite detail.
The process of developing jets is such an amazingly intense process of engineering; truly new jets are rare. I grasped immediately that the entire universe would be tractable and family-tree-like.
So cool seeing it laid out like this.
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This. The intuitive assumption underlying broad popular support for superannuation - that otherwise we can’t afford the pension - is so, so badly wrong.
Superannuation saves a tiny amount of age pension costs.
Tax breaks for super far outweigh any budget savings from lower pensions.
If you argue we need super to help the budget to afford pensions then you are wrong. You should support scrapping super if that is your reasoning
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Aidan Morrison retweeted
What is the world's most overrated problem?
It's easily climate change.
You can trust the experts. Climate change is real and it's happening. But the experts also do estimates of the damage, and the vast majority come out to less than 10% of world GDP by 2100.
That's not 10% poorer than today. It's 10% poorer than we otherwise would be. But if we increase GDP growth by less than 0.2 percentage points a year, it'll more than cover the likely effects of climate.
Getting off fossil fuels also has costs, and there are OECD projections where doing so doesn't even pay for itself by 2100.
Meanwhile, as temperatures go up, deaths from natural disasters have collapsed as increasing wealth allows people to better adjust to changing climate and weather.
Climate hysteria needs to be understood in the larger context of Westerners being enamored by the idea that we are evil for sinning against Mother Earth, who will eventually take her revenge.
This contradicts our history as a species, where growth and technology rather than restraint are what solve problems and increase human flourishing. richardhanania.com/p/climate…
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What a story.
Economist Milton Friedman once said, "Only a crisis - actual or perceived - produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions taken depend on the ideas lying around. Our basic function is to develop alternatives to existing policies and keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable."
This quote became @CanadiansEnergy guiding philosophy in our campaign to save the Pickering Nuclear Generating Station from early decommissioning.
As energy demand forecasts skyrocketed, and now as Trump's trade war brings energy security, domestic manufacturing and Canadian strategic autonomy to the forefront, our work to develop alternatives to the policy of shutting down Pickering became the "ideas that were lying around."
We are pleased that this government accepted our recommendations and made the right call to prioritize Ontario jobs and workers, clean air, and medical isotopes, and we look forward to the tremendous economic multiplier effect of this CANDU refurbishment during the challenging times of Trump's trade war on Canada.
Our campaign, launched in 2020, was an uphill battle. Labour unions that supported refurbishing the plant appreciated our efforts but had given up.
Not only were we the only organization fighting for this refurbishment at a time when nuclear power was struggling reputationally, but major bodies in the nuclear industry made several "interventions," asking us to call off our campaign.
Bizarrely, they communicated to us that our efforts were harmful to the nuclear sector. Over and over, they told us the decision to shut down the plant was a "done deal" and that we were "kicking a dead horse."
@CanadiansEnergy, however, receives no funding from said industry and had total freedom of action to continue our "Quixotic" quest.
Our determination to struggle on, which included holding rallies with placards painted with my son's art supplies at Queen's Park and outside @OPG headquarters, and the 100s of hours of collective energy and expertise we poured into our highly influential "Save Pickering" policy report authored by the extraordinarily talented @dylanjmoon, was rooted in our unshakeable and pan-partisan values: Pro-worker, pro-clean air, pro-climate and pro-health.
After all, the reactors at Pickering support 4500 direct and indirect jobs. They are a vital part of our nuclear backbone, which underpins Ontario's energy security and self-reliance. Its 2,200 MW baseload contribution was slated to be replaced by smog-producing natural gas generation, and the plant contributes 20% of the world's vital Cobalt-60 medical isotope, which is vital to maintaining the sterility of the medical supplies I use every day on shift in the Emergency Department.
To us, that was worth fighting for.
We faced several crises of confidence along the way, asking ourselves why we were pouring so much time into a seemingly hopeless campaign. No one played a greater role in keeping our spirits up and our efforts laser-focused on our goal than Canadians for Nuclear Energy co-founder @cadlam.
I'll close with another quote from the opposite side of the political spectrum as Mr. Friedman, American Anthropologist Margaret Mead.
“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has."
Long live Pickering!
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Aidan Morrison retweeted
They put too much solar on the grid, so it drives the value of the output to zero and the operators go bankrupt leaving €3bn of debt. Same would happen in Britain without generous subsidies.
Tyska soljätten Enerparc har ansökt om insolvens i Tyskland.
Bolaget äger och driver mer än 500 solcellsanläggningar.
Kvar står ett skuldberg på 33 miljarder kronor:
affarsvarlden.se/kronika/tys…
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Why is this not surprising.
Despite batteries getting cheaper, the relevant department in WA has pivoted back to gas as the lowest-cost means of peaking capacity.
The history of BRCP pricing in the chart below tells a story of ideological capture. Specifically, the mental gymnastics required to squeeze batteries in as the benchmark technology - which is supposed to be the cheapest option - while at the same time having to jack up prices by 113% over two years to make batteries viable.
Only to realise 4hr or even 6hr batteries still need gas backup thereafter. So you may as well get rid of the battery and just use gas instead.
Unfortunately for WA, we dumped $2bn worth of batteries into the grid over those two years, which will never pay for themselves.
And the increase in gas costs from 2026 to 2029? That's mostly a function of increased turbine costs, as datacentres bid up the world's supply of generators in search for cheap, dispatchable energy.
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This is what achieving net-zero for a nation looks like in practice.
Destroying domestic industries, exporting the emissions to another country who will produce the same thing instead.
Net-zero change in emissions globally.
DEMAND DESTRUCTION: Ineos will idle three of its chemical plants in northern England due to high energy costs🇬🇧 ⚠️
“With gas prices now 12 times the level in the US and eight times that of China, we just cannot compete,” said Chairman Ratcliffe
bloomberg.com/news/articles/…
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It was considered as part of the HumeLink process. This is from the PADR, the 'D' for Draft.
Looked like it would only cost a tiny bit more money. Note that the option 3C, which we took, was only $1.3 billion then. 3/
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Here's the scene of the crime, in the PACR, 'C' for conclusions, they rule out finishin the last leg into Sydney. Too expensive.
Oh, and taken option is at $3.3 billion by then.
Now, the final leg for Sydney Ring South is $3.5 billion on its own.
This is a planning disaster which I'll outline even more fully in an upcoming paper. 4/4
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Nearly a year ago, I identified that the project between Bannaby and Sydney, called Sydney Ring South, was perhaps the most urgently required transmission upgrade in NSW.
The 2026 Transmission Annual Planning Report confirms this.
In each little blue box, the bottom left number is the highest throughput experienced, as a fraction of it's normal rating. These are perhaps the most importnat numbers to look at.
For Line 39, which is the current most direct link between southern NSW, that's 98%. The highest on the page.
The others going south are 91% and 94%, for line 17 and 11. So getting power into the South of Sydney is a real problem, already.
There's a power-flow-control option being discussed to try to squeeze more power into Sydney, by basically tricking the alternating electic fields to squeeze a bit of power into the lines that are at 91% and 94% rather than the one at 98%. That doesn't really do that much, as you can imagine.
So the burning question is why is Sydney Ring South the last cab off the rank? What use will HumeLink be, landing up to 2.2GW of power from Snowy 2.0 at Bannaby, where the line direct from there to Sydney is at 98%, and it's buddies down the coast are also above 90%? 1/
When Jesus said "the first will be last and the last will be first" he wasn't giving instructions on how to build out transmission lines.
And yet... In NSW...
This is the story of Sydney Ring South.
Probably the most urgently needed transmission line. Approved to be... delayed??!
Until? Ummm... sometime... after 2033? We'll kick off the first stage of planning and approvals next year.
Now don't get me wrong, I'm firmly opposed to building excessive transmission to facilitate an enormous build-out of weather-dependent generation that has no hope of providing reliable electricity at anything the like the cost of centralised, thermal generation for baseload.
This isn't a giddyup.
This is exhibit A in an epic cluster....
As it happens, a large chunk of wind energy that is ALREADY BUILT in NSW is stuck in a pocket that often can't reach the Sydney load basin when needed most.
At times, we have gigawatts of electricity flowing in the WRONG DIRECTION, exporting electricity from NSW to Victoria, when their spot price is negative, and ours is very positive because we can't get enough power into Sydney, which drives up costs to consumers.
And, here's the kicker:
This project was specifically requested by Transgrid, @Transgrid_AU (the regulated NSW transmission company) to be made 'actionable' in the 2024 ISP framework, after the consultation draft was published without it, because... reasons... big rush.
The Market Operator, @AEMO_Energy, obliged.
And this year, when the process kicked off in the 2024 ISP was meant to deliver its first major regulatory milestone, Transgrid then asked the Regulator to push the deadline back almost a year.
Buckle up... 1/
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The answer is in this chart. There is even worse congestion just a bir further South, in the region where we've built most of NSW's wind farms, Gullen, Crookwell, Rye Park etc. And up in the Snowy Scheme.
But what's the point in relieving some of that (actually only the bit near Tumut/Maragle, HumeLink doesn't have any transformers that mesh with the 330kV network between there and Bannaby) if it lands at a place that's almost as congested for the final leg into Sydney? 2/
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Transgrid's TAPR confirms that the Expansion of the Central West Orana REZ is 'Actionable'.
But to me it looks like it's actually a variation that is not an addition to the first plan. Instead, the connection points and hubs are completely altered for lines intended to be built for the first stage.
More evidence that this is make-it-up-as-you-go network design and planning, with phases blurring together. Modifications and scope creep bleeding across different contracts, making it impossible to distinguish a cost blow-out in one stage from an expansion of scope in the next.
Central West Orana Renewable Energy Zone was meant to be a 'pilot' REZ for NSW, and effectively the nation.
NSW and the Federal government committed to it in a MOU in January 2020. Network capacity intended to be 3GW, cost $650 mil, and finished by 2022.
Perfect 'pilot'! Then we could see what worked, learn lessons, and continue the roll-out, right?
What it's become to date is the complete inverse of that. It's become a behemoth mega-project with phases, expansions and enablements being committed to for many billions of dollars, and won't deliver anything until 2029 at the earliest.
The declared target network transfer capacity now sits at 6GW. It will be one of the biggest REZ's in the country. The first phase (just to reach 4.5GW) has been contracted at $5.5 billion. But this also requires 'enabling works' contracted separately of $400 million. And offials acknowledge that go beyond 3GW and reach 4.5GW, another multi-billion transmission mega-project (Hunter Transmission Project) is also required.
Worse still, none of the anchor tenants that have been allocated access rights for stage 1 have reached financial close yet. So 6 billion in network costs are now committed, without any confirmation that the network will actually be used.
But wait... there's more!
In the latest ISP, an Expansion has been made 'actionable'. That includes another two energy 500kV energy hubs with six massive 500kV transformers. The first phase had just four such transformers, at one hub.
Cryptically, one of new hubs doesn't have a known location, and is just 'at least two km' away from the last one.
Listen to my explainer if you want to hear me try to make sense of some of this. A somewhat technical explainer where I argue that the requirement for transformers, the giant on/off-ramps to the high-voltage 500kV network, has been chronically underestimated for some time. 1/
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Can anyone, @AusPoll6 or otherwise make this make sense?
How is 25.5% actually (+0.5) from 30%? (ONP)
Or 15.5% reflect a (-0.5) change from 13%? (GRN)
Are these two polls of the same question?
And similar participant numbers?
Overlapping sample dates?
Posted within a day?
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BHP: “electric trucks were not suitable for mass deployment because they would need to stop to charge for 30 minute up to 8 times a day.”
Fortescue: “Charging time for battery-electric trucks is only one part of the operating model – it should not be considered in isolation”
Which side is grounded in reality here?
The Fortescue guys appeal to some ‘whole of system’ operational benefit.
But I can’t help but think that that kind of onerous charging requirement is an easy way to wreck the whole system. Not just raw the down-time, but the fast-repeating must-make scheduling, in time and space, you need the facilities at all these locations, intense electrical infrastructure to deliver that… what happens when something changes/breaks? Those hundreds of trucks and their every-few hours space-dependent charging schedule with many MW of electrical infrastructure has to change too.
Fuel density delivers flexibility. That’s what Fortescue is fighting against.
I’m sure they’d just call me a naysayer. Good luck to them, if they can make it work, good on ‘em.
BHP hits the brakes on electric trucks as it frets about charging times, but rival Fortescue says it's missing the point thedriven.io/2026/09/18/bhp-…
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