Australia has endorsed a useful COP31-era number: 35% of global final energy demand supplied by electricity by 2035. The target is directionally right, and it is easy to under-read. If it is treated as another energy-share statistic, it will miss what electrification actually does.
The better reading is that 35% electricity is a test of whether countries are moving useful energy services onto the efficient energy carrier. A litre of diesel in a haul truck, a gigajoule of gas in a boiler and a kilowatt-hour of electricity in a motor can all be converted into units on an energy chart, but they do not deliver the same amount of useful work.
Fossil energy systems throw away a lot of what official statistics count. Electric systems waste much less. That is the primary-energy trap, and it makes electrification look slower than it really is while making the remaining task look larger than it really is.
Marco Möller, an energy analyst whose recent LinkedIn curve on the primary-energy fallacy has been circulating in energy circles, has a useful way of showing this.
Michael Liebreich, of BNEF and hydrogen-ladder fame, and Paul Martin, of primary-energy-fallacy and hopium fame, have amplified the same basic point: primary energy is a poor way to judge electrification progress when the comparison is between waste-heavy combustion and efficient electric pathways.
Using a midpoint ratio of about 2.3 units of fossil primary energy to one unit of electric useful service, 35% electricity in primary-energy statistics is not really 35% of useful energy services. It is closer to 55%. The exact number moves with the sector mix, but the direction of the correction does not. The official denominator still includes a large amount of fossil conversion loss.
Primary-energy statistics understate electrification because electric systems waste far less energy.
That makes the 35% target more than a diplomatic statement. It is a competitiveness test. Countries that move transport, heat, industry and freight onto electricity get more value from every additional unit of clean generation. Countries that keep treating electrification as a power-sector issue will find that their official energy charts change slowly for physical reasons, not just policy reasons.
I wrote about this last year in CleanTechnica using a chart of the percentage of total energy supplied by electricity across China, Europe, the United States and India from around 1990 to the early 2020s.
China was the outlier. It moved from roughly 8% to 10% electrification in 1990 to about 30% by the early 2020s, with the slope steepening after 2005 and again in the most recent years. Europe started higher but barely moved. The United States rose a little and then largely stagnated. India improved for a while and then stalled.
The chart looked like an energy statistic, but it was really an industrial-policy chart: it showed which economies were moving useful work onto electricity and which were still treating electrification as a marginal power-sector story.
China has raised electricity’s share of total energy far faster than Europe, the US or India.
China has installed more solar panels, wind turbines, batteries, high-speed rail and electric vehicles than anyone else, but the more important point is that more of its useful economic activity is moving onto electricity. That creates compounding advantages. A clean kilowatt-hour in a highly electrified economy displaces more fossil energy services than the same kilowatt-hour in an economy still organized around boilers, engines and imported oil.
Europe’s problem is different. It started more electrified, but the curve has been stubborn. It has built a great deal of renewable electricity and has cut power-sector emissions, but much of transport, heat and industry has moved slowly. North America’s problem is more obvious. Cheap fossil fuels and a century of car-dependent infrastructure have kept electrification progress weak and encouraged policy detours into alternative fuels.
Australia now has to decide which pattern it is following. The country has world-class solar resources, world-class rooftop uptake, increasingly serious batteries and a power sector that is already shifting.
But Australia’s primary-energy system remains overwhelmingly fossil. Oil, coal and gas still dominate the official energy mix. That makes the primary-energy fallacy especially relevant, because Australia’s charts still count a great deal of waste heat as if it were useful energy.
The Australia analysis also needs a sectoral correction. A single smooth Möller-style curve is useful for explaining the denominator problem, but it is not a country model. Coal and gas power generation push Australia’s curve strongly in the electrification direction. Replacing thermal generation with wind, solar, hydro, storage and transmission removes large conversion losses from the official denominator.
Road transport does the same. Petrol and diesel engines waste most of their fuel energy as heat; electric drivetrains turn a much larger share into motion. Buildings add another wedge where heat pumps replace gas combustion and deliver more useful heat per unit of energy.
Mining is the interesting one, because it is too often labelled hard to abate as a category rather than assessed by load, duty cycle and technology readiness. Some mining loads are difficult, remote and operationally unforgiving. That does not make them immune to electrification.
Fortescue’s mining-equipment electrification program is a useful proof point. Its partnership with Liebherr covers hundreds of zero-emission mining machines, including autonomous battery-electric haul trucks, electric excavators and battery-powered dozers.
This is not a token pilot. Fortescue’s mining fleet consumes hundreds of millions of litres of diesel in a year and accounts for more than half of the company’s Scope 1 emissions. When loads that large move from diesel engines to electric drivetrains, the primary-energy denominator shrinks materially.
That matters for the Australian version of the curve. Mining should not be treated as easy in the same way as replacing a gas hot water system with a heat pump or a petrol car with an EV. It has different duty cycles, charging requirements, site designs and capital-stock turnover.
But Fortescue shows that mining is no longer a theoretical electrification category. It is becoming a procurement, infrastructure and execution category. That shifts a meaningful chunk of Australia’s fossil energy from residual use into electrifiable demand with harder implementation.
The caution is still real. LNG production, aviation, shipping, some high-temperature industrial heat, feedstocks and process chemistry all flatten the Australian curve. They are why a simple midpoint lookup should not become an overconfident conclusion.
Some fossil primary energy is genuinely harder to eliminate or substitute. Some of it will require demand reduction, process redesign, biofuels, material substitution or very carefully rationed molecules. Some of it will simply be expensive.
In official primary-energy terms, 35% electricity sounds like one-third of the job. In useful-service terms, it may be closer to half, depending on the sector mix.
In Australia’s case, the answer is pulled upward by coal generation, road transport, buildings and increasingly mining. It is pulled downward by LNG, aviation, shipping and the industrial tail.
Treating 35% electrification as a COP headline would miss the point. The serious version is to electrify the loads that are already technically and economically ready, build the grid and storage around them, and stop using speculative molecules to preserve fossil demand.
Every electric vehicle, heat pump, battery, transmission line, industrial electrode boiler, electric mine truck and port charger does two things at once. It replaces fossil fuel directly, and it shrinks the waste-heavy denominator that makes the transition look harder than it is.
That does not make the transition easy. Australia needs to move useful energy services onto clean electricity fast enough that official primary-energy statistics start to reflect the decline of fossil conversion losses.
China is already bending that curve. Europe is inching along it. North America remains largely stuck. Australia still has a choice: treat 35% electrification as a diplomatic target for COP31, or treat it as an instruction to move the economy onto the most efficient energy carrier as quickly as possible.
