Note: This is a transcript of a speech delivered at the Noosa EV Expo on the weekend, where representatives from Renew Economy and its sister sister site The Driven were invited to speak.
Before I begin I’d like to tell you what I’m not – I’m not an electrician. I’m not an engineer. I’m not an energy economist.
What I am is a curious journalist who likes to ask questions. Over the past few years I’ve spoken to hundreds of people — electricians, engineers, network operators, researchers, ministers, business owners, and ordinary households trying to make sense of the energy transition.
So what I can share tonight is a synthesis of what I’m hearing from the people who are building, regulating, studying and living this transition.
So let’s start with the good news.
Australia has become the world leader in rooftop solar.
More than 4.3 million homes now have solar panels. That’s approximately one in three Australian households. No other country comes close to that.
Our total rooftop solar capacity now exceeds 28 gigawatts — more than the country’s entire fleet of coal-fired power stations. Our biggest power station isn’t in the Hunter Valley. It’s on our rooftops.
Queensland, of course, is leading the nation in number of rooftop solar installations — 1.16 million systems and counting.
Now let’s add batteries.
The launch of the government’s Cheaper Home Batteries program in July last year, turbo charged battery installations. The numbers have exceeded every forecast, every projection, every model.
Australia has surpassed 400,000 home battery installations – over 11 gigawatt-hours of distributed storage. That’s about 7 Waratah super batteries, the biggest battery of any type on Australia’s grid.
It’s a great example of government perfectly matching consumer readiness/demand/need/sentiment.
The take up of batteries has even surprised AEMO — the Australian Energy Market Operator. They had assumed batteries would need to be orchestrated at scale through Virtual Power Plants to deliver meaningful benefits for the grid – to be coordinated and controlled by the industry like an orchestra.
But less than 10% of battery owners have joined a VPP. And yet these batteries are delivering benefits for the grid – they’re reducing the evening peak demand, and lowering system costs — without being enrolled in VPPs.
The lesson isn’t that VPPs don’t matter. I think the lesson is that households matter. A lot.
Households are effectively saying: “I’ll take control of my own energy.”
And they’re doing it because: the grid feels expensive, fuel feels volatile, and the alternatives are viable.
Electrification is no longer just a climate story. It’s an economic story. A cost-of-living story.
Saul Griffith describes what we’re witnessing as the largest infrastructure project in Australian history. The centre of gravity in our energy system is shifting from big generation plants to millions of devices in homes, businesses and depots.
But unlike previous infrastructure consumer assets aren’t being built by governments or corporations.
They’re being bought by families.
And they’re doing it because the economics have changed.
Rewiring Australia’s recent Electrification Tipping Point report found Australia has crossed a threshold where electrification is no longer a trade-off between climate action and saving money. The two are now the same thing.
The average fossil-fuelled household could save around $4,100 a year by fully electrifying — more than $60,000 over fifteen years.
But here’s the thing about a transformation of this scale that’s working.
It inevitably creates new problems.
The electrification dividend is real. But right now, it’s flowing primarily to Australians who already have advantages — homeowners, with higher incomes, and access to capital.
Wealthier households are capturing more capacity, more savings, and more resilience.
At the same time, Energy Consumers Australia reports that one in five Australian households is either vulnerable to, or experiencing, energy hardship.
We are at real risk of creating a two-speed energy transition. One for those with capital and a roof. And another for everyone else.
Approximately one third of Australians rent. And they face a structural barrier: the split incentive. Landlords pay for upgrades and own the assets. Tenants receive the bill savings.
Several agencies argue that minimum rental standards are the most important equity measure that we now need – the rental equivalent of seatbelts in cars.
Rather than allowing landlords to rent out cold, draughty homes with inefficient appliances, minimum standards would ensure every renter has access to a basic level of comfort, health and energy efficiency.
But that comes down to political will and we still have a patchwork when we need a national standard.
There are some promising innovations emerging for renters though. Portable batteries that renters can take from home to home. “Cloud solar” products that give renters access to the benefits of solar generation regardless of where they live. The Solar Sharer offer the government has mandated that will give all energy consumers access to three hours of free electricity in the middle of the day. And plug-in balcony solar systems, which are already big in Germany, that don’t require major structural work or landlord approval.
For apartment residents — around 15 per cent of the population, up to 3 million people — the barriers are even more structural.
Solar and batteries require approval from Owners Corporations, by-laws have to be navigated along with unco-operative or disinterested neighbours, strata governance is complex, and legal advice is often needed. Most strata committees lack in-house energy expertise.
There is some progress on the apartment front. NSW and Victoria now offer grants for apartment solar, and NSW removed the strata blocking vote on EV chargers and rooftop solar last year so only a simple majority is needed rather than a 75 per cent super majority.
Technology is helping. Most of the apartments that have accessed state grants are using SolShare — developed by Australian company Allume Energy — which allows electricity from a single rooftop solar system to be shared between multiple apartments.
I spoke to the co-founder of Allume this week after they launched SolShare 2, which adds shared battery storage to the solar — he says this could potentially lift annual savings to around $756 per apartment.
But solutions like this need to become mainstream.
Gas is retreating fast. AEMO forecasts residential gas demand falling by around one-fifth just over the next five years.
Modelling by Climateworks Centre suggests electrification and energy efficiency improvements together could cut residential gas demand by 64 per cent over the next decade.
But again we have a structural problem. Every household that leaves the gas network takes their share of the maintenance bill with them — but the same pipes still need maintaining. Fewer customers. Same infrastructure costs. Rising tariffs. Which pushes more customers to leave. Which raises tariffs further.
The gas death spiral.
The danger is not that gas declines. The danger is that the decline is chaotic and unmanaged. We’ve seen what that looks like in regional Victoria, where more than a thousand households faced gas closures operated by Solstice Energy and found themselves being pushed toward LPG — not electrification. Many were blindsided. Many couldn’t afford to upgrade.
Esperance in Western Australia did it differently and by most accounts successfully — this was a town that made a planned, coordinated transition off gas, where the energy company dealt directly with every household and the government bank rolled the transition, in the main on to electrical appliances.
The death spiral is inevitable. The chaos that comes with an unmanaged version of it is not.
A common fear about electrification is that it will overwhelm the grid. Everyone charging EVs at 6pm. Everyone running heat pumps and induction cooktops and electric hot water systems at once.
It’s a reasonable concern. But the evidence suggests we need to ask another question.
The issue is not whether electrification will bust the grid. The issue is coordination.
I spoke to a senior executive for the future grid at Endeavour Energy last week — they’re the network partner on the Electrify 2515 project which is in the process of electrifying a whole community on the NSW south coast – 500 homes.
This is a real life pilot project that is showing the challenges and opportunities of electrifying our homes.
He’s confident that even if electricity demand doubles over time, we don’t need to double transmission infrastructure. What we need is smarter coordination. When EVs charge. When hot-water systems run. How batteries interact with the grid. How to shift demand into the middle of the day when solar is abundant.
How to consume energy intelligently.
But again there’s a catch. Some households and businesses could be locked into proprietary ecosystems when they buy solar, batteries and EVs from different manufacturers whose products can’t easily talk to each other or can only communicate with certain retailers. Interoperability they call it.
I spoke to one tech entrepreneur working in this space who says we need open source standards for consumer energy devices — so that all these assets can work together and be coordinated efficiently.
Electrify 2515 if also revealing that householders need significantly more support to electrify, and many energy upgrades are turning out to be more expensive than anticipated.
It’s also revealing …
The workforce shortage in electrical trades is a constraint on the pace of electrification.
Jobs and Skills Australia estimates Australia will need up to 84,000 more electricians over the coming years.
A faster electrification transition that doesn’t invest in training the workforce to deliver it is a transition that is likely to fail.
Consumers don’t trust the energy industry. Many don’t understand their tariffs. Many don’t know if they’re on a good deal. Many are paying a loyalty tax.
Energy Consumers Australia found that 58 per cent of households only want a basic relationship with the energy system — a fair price, reliable supply, good service. Keep the lights on.
They don’t want to become energy traders. They don’t want to decode tariff structures. They don’t want to shop around constantly to avoid being ripped off.
Yet the energy retail market routinely rewards disengagement with a loyalty tax. Choice estimates the average consumer loses around $430 a year simply by staying on the same plan. The AEMC this week released its final Pricing Review report, but stepped back from banning the loyalty tax outright — opting instead for requiring retailers to notify long-term customers how much extra they’ve paid.
Whether that will be enough is debateable.
What’s not contested is this: as energy systems become more complex — batteries, EVs, time-of-use tariffs, virtual power plants, demand response — the information burden on consumers grows. If people don’t trust the system, they won’t engage with it. And if they don’t engage with it, it will be difficult to realise the full potential of distributed electrification.
Which means, trusted, knowledgeable installers are key to this transition.
I’ve focussed largely on households tonight because that’s my world on SwitchedOn. But the electrification of businesses is lagging, and the opportunity is enormous.
A recent IEEFA analysis found Australian businesses have installed only around 5.6 gigawatts of commercial and industrial rooftop solar — despite consuming more electricity than households. The estimated potential is around 28 gigawatts on commercial rooftops alone, even more if we include agricultural buildings.
In other words: Australian households have largely embraced rooftop solar. Australian businesses have barely scratched the surface.
I run a series on SwitchedOn called “How I Electrified” — stories of how real people have made the transition to all-electric homes. People like to hear how other people have done it.
One conversation I had recently was with Anna and Michael in Fitzroy North. Their electrification journey took twenty-five years. And what struck me wasn’t the battery, or the solar, or the induction cooktop.
It was where they started. Insulation. Draught-proofing. Double glazing.
They wanted to make a cold Melbourne terrace comfortable to live in. Before they electrified, they reduced demand. Before they installed batteries, they made the house perform better. The result is a home that’s healthier, quieter, more comfortable — and dramatically cheaper to run.
Householders want a comfortable home – it’s an obvious point but it can easily get overlooked in the race for new appliances.
Insulation batts don’t get a press release, unless someone dies. But they’re doing a big chunk of the work in many of the electrification stories I hear about.
Efficiency also matters for emissions. The Energy Efficiency Council’s modelling, based on Climateworks analysis, found electrification and efficiency together are Australia’s biggest demand-side abatement opportunity to 2035.
Of course a heat pump in a well-sealed home is an unambiguous win. But a resistive heater in a leaky one will barely move the needle. Efficiency is what turns electrification from a coin flip into a win.
The same modelling found efficiency can offset up to a quarter of the extra demand electrification would otherwise create. A well-insulated, well-shaded home needs a smaller heat pump, fewer panels, and a smaller battery.
In Melbourne the conversation is about staying warm. Here, it’s more likely to be about staying cool — shading, sealing, ceiling fans, efficient air conditioning. Same principle: the cheapest energy is the energy you never have to generate, store or buy.
What does a path forward look like?
Here is what we know.
The global energy shock that has been unfolding this past year has reminded us why pace matters. The homes with solar on their roofs, batteries in their garages, and EVs in their driveways are sleeping better at night than those still dependent on fuel priced by people on the other side of the world.
We have proved that electrification works. We have proved that consumers will lead when the conditions are right.
The question is whether governments, industry, and market institutions can keep up — and whether we can make sure the people who need this transition most aren’t the last ones to benefit from it.
If we get this right, we won’t just have cleaner energy.
We’ll have cheaper energy. Healthier more comfortable homes. More resilient communities.
And a future that belongs to all of us.
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