It is verging on exciting to think about the next three years. As I wrote here and others have covered in RenewEconomy, in terms of climate and energy, Labor’s second term will be nothing like their first.
Their tentpole policies will face implentation phases, growing pains and the need to rapidly accelerate. It will all occur under the eye of a Labor party that feels both emboldened, but likely also somewhat cautious and careful in the face of various global crises that we can be sure will emerge.
It will be a time of numbers, not rhetoric – a term in which we can start judging progress based on metrics, targets and data. Below are what feel to me like some of the key figures we are going to need to keep a close eye on, in the coming months.
8.6% per year
The annual change in non-fossil power generation proportion required each of Labor’s three years, to get back on track to hit 82% renewables in the National Electricity Market, by the year 2030. In the three years of Labor’s first term, the share grew by 4%, then 3% and then in the final year, by 1%.
But Labor’s Capacity Investment Scheme seems extremely likely to inject a wind back into clean power growth in Australia, already causing a noticeable shift in the early-stage development. That shift is still insufficient to be properly on track, but the ‘energy election’ should hopefully put some momentum back into policy here. Whatever happens, it will be pretty exciting to track closely.
10%
The latest projections report from the government’s Department of Climate Change, Energy, Environment and Water (DCCEEW) suggests Labor’s Safeguard Mechanism and vehicle efficiency policies only really kick in post-2028. Emissions drop 10% through to 2028 compared to 2024 levels though – thanks mostly to the deployment of renewable energy in the grid.
While previous projections reports have leaned on the land-use sector to get to the 43% by 2030 target (the chart below and the number above excludes land use, as it always should), the latest report somewhat more confidently projects real emissions reductions in other sectors – as you can see, the first real projection of a steeper emissions drop for some time, but in the short term, far more pessimistic than previous projections. Noticeably, most of that confidence is reserved until after 2027.
114 grams of carbon dioxide equivalent per kilometre
If Labor’s vehicle efficiency standard is on track, this will be the average emissions intensity of vehicles sold in the year 2028. It’s buried in the aforementioned projections report, but it’s remarkable – if this goes to plan, the average car you buy at the next election will be half the emissions intensity of a car you bought at this one.
‘Light commercial vehicles’ see less of a steep drop, but it’s still significant. This will be a very simple benchmark through which to test the pace of change among the sale of new vehicles.
44 + 50
The number of gas and coal extraction projects in the development pipeline, as of December 2024. Some of these are big, some are small. Some are likely to go ahead, and some are project spam. 5,025 terajoules per day of new fossil gas will come online before 2028, and about 150 new megatonnes / year of coal will come into play, too.
Some of these new projects replace declining output from existing sites, or the closure of existing sites – but if these all go ahead, there’s a good chance of a net increase of fossil fuels. There is no target or metric to track here, because Australia does not set targets to reduce its fossil fuel extraction.
