Nuclear won’t cut it: CCA says Australia must go all in on renewables to meet climate targets

Australia will not reach net zero emissions by 2050 under the federal Coalition’s nuclear power plan, according to a comprehensive new report that puts the shift to 100 per cent renewables at the centre of all plausible pathways to meet the global climate target.

In its inaugural Sector Pathways Review, published on Thursday, the Climate Change Authority charts a course for how Australia can decarbonise – either by 2050, in keeping with currents targets, or by 2040, if we want to limit global warming to 1.5°C.

The 2040 scenario has Australia meeting and beating its 2030 emissions target and reaching a reduction of 75 per cent on 2005 levels by 2035 – spurring hope this might be the number the Albanese government settles on when it finally delivers its promised interim target.

Under both scenarios, black and brown coal disappear entirely from the electricity mix by 2035, while total annual generation more than doubles its current levels, jumping from around 280 terawatt-hours in 2025 to 659TWh in 2050 on the 2°C pathway and to 767TWh on the 1.5°C pathway.

In both cases, by 2050 all of this new power comes from huge amounts of large-scale wind, solar, backed by storage. The 1.5°C pathway sees even fossil gas drop almost entirely out of the mix by 2040.

“Rapid decarbonisation and expansion of the electricity and energy sector is the key to meeting Australia’s economy-wide emissions reduction targets,” the report says.

“There is a clear and viable decarbonisation pathway for the sector that relies on known technologies to deliver very large emissions reductions and facilitate reductions in other sectors.”

Nuclear, meanwhile, is not a part of the CSIRO modelling for the CCA, “as it is currently prohibited in Australia.” But the report does note that it would be incredibly costly and take to long to build, anyway.

“Australia’s lack of experience in building and managing nuclear power stations may reasonably lead to additional costs for a first-of-a-kind unit deployed in Australia,” the report says.

“The estimated lead time of 15 to 20 years before operation (Graham et al., 2024) suggests this technology cannot make a timely contribution to replacing the generation capacity of retiring coal-fired power stations or to helping Australia achieve its carbon budget targets to 2050.”

So it’s down to renewables – huge amounts of them, as quickly as possible.

To this end, CCA chair and former NSW energy minister Matt Kean says developers of solar and wind projects need to engage with regional communities about infrastructure’s role in the energy transition, and better explain the sharing of benefits from the rollout.

Cooperation across and between federal and state governments and on both sides of the political fence will also be key.

“Good progress is being made on decarbonising the energy sector and rolling out firmed renewables. But to achieve a rapid and orderly transition to net zero, all sectors of the economy, along with all levels of government, must plan and act together.

“By overcoming the barriers to reducing emissions we can make the Australian economy more prosperous while creating new industries and jobs, improving our energy security, protecting the environment, and reducing the cost of living.”

Of course, energy and electricity is only one of the six sectors the CCA report addresses, and the path forward for the rest of them – agriculture and land, built environment, industry and waste, transport, and resources – is not always as clear cut.

Only the land sector is projected to achieve net negative emissions, the report says, and it does so by removing carbon from the atmosphere through the “age-old technologies of managing soils and vegetation.”

But critics are concerned that heavy reliance on potentially overstated carbon reductions in the land sector, and on future carbon removal using technologies and techniques that are not yet proven, are clouding Australia’s emissions outlook.

As Ketan Joshi noted on LinkedIn earlier this week, when you take out international offsets – a favourite of the former federal Coalition government – and the land sector, Australia has a pretty poor track record on emissions reduction, so far – and on emissions account keeping, for that matter.

“The year-on-year rise in greenhouse gas emissions for the June 2024 quarter in Australia’s power sector was 1.9 MTCO2-e. There hasn’t been a year-on-year rise this large since December 2014: when Tony Abbott was Prime Minister and we were all nearly one decade younger,” Joshi writes.

And yet, “the projections due out October/November will show Australia ‘on track’ to hit its targets, entirely due to massive, opaque and unprecedented revisions to land use sector data, and no matter what trajectory real emissions data show.”

As for the resources sector, the CCA report notes that emissions from the resources sector were 99 Mt CO²-e in 2022, contributing to 23% of national emissions and dominated by fossil fuel combustion and fugitive emissions from the mining, oil and gas subsectors.

Critics have noted that coal and gas mining is at no point ruled out of the mix in the CCA modelling, leaving the considerable contribution of fugitive emissions to be addressed by developing or future technologies – or balanced out by other sectors. The emissions Australia exports with its coal and gas are not factored in at all.

Rather, the report recommends that decarbonisation of the sector will need widespread electrification, and deployment of fugitive abatement technologies in oil, gas and coal mining operations.

But as the chart below shows, even under the more ambitious 1.5°C decarbonisation scenario, fossil fuel contribution to resources sector output reduces by just 60 per cent by 2050.

“The clearest pathway to reducing emissions from that sector is to reduce production,” Georgina Woods, the head of research and investigations at the Lock the Gate Alliance, said on LinkedIn on Thursday.

“Industry is not stepping up to voluntarily reduce production but doing so is necessary to Australia’s net zero plan: it is abundantly clear that a fossil fuel phase out plan must come from [state and federal] governments.”

The Greens said on Thursday that Labor’s backing of new coal and gas mines and their failure – thus far – to commit to a strong 2035 emissions target have “shredded” the party’s climate credibility.

“The Greens want Australia to set a goal of net-zero by 2035,” the party said a statement.

“Instead Labor continues to open new coal and gas mines, and appears to be kicking the can down the road when it comes to setting strong climate targets. Labor has approved 23 coal and gas projects since coming to government.”

The Australian Conservation Foundation says it is good to see a 75% emissions reduction target for 2035 modelled using existing technology, but this should also include a phasing out of fossil fuel extraction.

“The government must not turn its back on the opportunities that come with climate action,” said ACF campaigns director and acting CEO Dr Paul Sinclair.

“Beyond electricity, the sector pathways review highlights the need for government action to build up the clean energy industries and renewable exports of Australia’s future.

“The Authority’s analysis and its modelled scenarios makes it clear that to achieve net zero, the extraction of fossil fuels will need to be reduced and ultimately phased out.”

But a phaseout of fossil fuel extraction is not really factored in. Instead the report points to “further development and widespread deployment of reservoir carbon capture and storage (CCS), and other abatement measures such as leak detection and repair programs and gas recovery systems.

“Deployment of methane mitigation technologies in underground coal mines, such as ventilation air methane (VAM) abatement technologies and gas drainage and utilisation, will be needed.

“Implementation of VAM abatement technologies is more nascent, with hurdles needing to be overcome before there is commercial-scale demonstration within Australia’s coal mining regulatory environment.”

Even then, the report concedes that “based on available technologies, several sources of emissions across the sector are expected to remain largely unabated while the activities continue.

There are few opportunities to significantly reduce fugitive emissions from surface coal mines, for example. While for existing offshore oil and gas facilities, space constraints other logistical challenges limit the opportunity to electrify.

Ultimately, the best piece of policy advice from the CCA might be contained in the below few sentences, taken from the report’s summary:

“Working to reduce emissions now, using existing technologies, is far more efficient and effective than waiting and hoping that bigger breakthroughs will do all the work.

“Waiting for new, better, cheaper technologies is tantamount to choosing to continue to emit. …Waiting means greenhouse gases will continue to accumulate in the atmosphere, trapping more heat and causing more of the impacts already being felt.

“The most sensible thing to do is to stop emitting greenhouse gases as much and as quickly as possible. It would be a mistake to wait.”