Accelerating Australia’s energy transition means making renewables projects faster

Renewable projects are coming online faster than ever, but it may not be fast enough. To reach our 2030 renewable energy target, Australia will need around 40 wind turbines to start generating every month, and 22,000 solar panels each day. Faster action, facilitated by smoother government approval processes, will allow Australia to keep its climate commitments.

2024

Read time: 4 mins

Based on Waiting to generate: An analysis of onshore wind and solar PV project development lead-times in Australia, published March 2024.

Key takeaways

Australia’s target of 82 per cent renewable energy by 2030 can’t be achieved without short project development lead-times.

Completion times for renewable wind and solar projects have sped up significantly, particularly in South Australia. But it may not be fast enough to meet the national target.

Setting maximum times for approval decisions, and giving developers clearer information, could help speed up the process.

Solar and wind projects are faster to build than big fossil-energy plants, but government approval processes in the pre-construction phase can be complex and has slowed some projects down.

Research co-authored by Dr Thomas Longden, a Visiting Fellow at the Institute for Climate, Energy & Disaster Solutions at ANU, found that completion times have sped up significantly in recent years, but it may not be fast enough to achieve our renewable energy targets.

The decrease in completion times is encouraging but these improvements are not guaranteed to continue.

For solar projects that started before 2010, the average time was 83 months. By 2016-2020, this dropped to 41 months. There was a similar reduction for wind projects. Before 2011, onshore wind projects took over 100 months on average. After 2016, this decreased to 53 months.

Most of this improvement was due to improvements in the pre-construction administrative approvals phase, especially for onshore wind.

Government approvals could be further sped up to help industry match the pace needed to achieve Australia’s targets. The researchers identified a few ways to do this:

Giving developers clear steps to follow in the approval process Allowing developers to deal with one central agency.
Giving all relevant authorities maximum response times for key stages of the approval process.
Encouraging large projects to be built in multiple stages using the same or a similar set of approvals.

Additionally, suitable projects located close to existing projects could be assessed as expansions and not new developments.

Authorities are already allowing this for grid-scale batteries when they are installed at solar farms. Measurement and reporting of completion times could also be improved. Without accurate information, stakeholders are left to speculate about administrative process timings.

Completion time impacts investment decisions and project costs, especially when re-financing occurs at a time with higher interest rates. Without clear information, projects with long delays could distort expectations of completion times and adversely influence renewable energy investment.

“Projects with long delays could distort expectations of completion times and adversely influence renewable energy investment.”

Conclusion

While solar and wind projects are coming online much faster than they have in the past, Australia’s renewable energy targets are likely to require an even faster transition. Quicker, simpler government approval processes can help this, by ensuring that renewable projects can get approved and powering Australia as soon as possible.