Renewables sail past 70 pct on Australia’s main grid, send coal to fresh lows

Renewable energy generation set a new record on Australia’s National Electricity Market on Wednesday, with the combined contributions from rooftop solar, and large-scale solar and wind pushing past 70 per cent briefly at 11am and then again at 11.45am, at an all-time high of 70.6%.

The new record for maximum instantaneous share of renewables on the NEM beats the record set only one day earlier, of 69.1% at midday on September 19, and notches up a major new milestone in Australia’s transition to a grid powered mostly by solar and wind.

The 70.6% high, which is bound to be bested again very soon, was largely brought to us by a huge chunk of rooftop solar generation, which as you can see below contributed more than half of the new record with a 37.4% share at 11.45am.

Utility-scale solar contributed 17.7% at the time of the record, while wind contributed 13.8%.

On the flip-side, the share of coal on the NEM was crushed to new lows, setting its own records on that metric on the NEM and in some of Australia’s most coal dependent states.

According to Geoff Eldridge, a data analyst from GPE NemLog 2, a new record minimum instantaneous NEM coal share of 28.5% was also recorded at 11:45am, down 0.55% from previous low of 29.1% at around midday on October 28 last year.

A new coal low was reached in New South Wales, as well, where the instantaneous share dropped to 22% at 11:45am, down 0.16% from the 22.1% recorded just yesterday.

Queensland, too, saw a new record low for the share of coal on its grid, hitting 34.6% at 12:55 on Wednesday September 20 (today), down 0.72% from previous low of 35.3%, also set in October last year.

The spate of new records follow new operational demand lows set over the weekend, including a record low demand on the NEM of 11,393MW at 12.30pm on Saturday, a 4.2% fall from the previous record set last spring (Nov 2022). At the time, rooftop and grid-scale solar contributed 57% of total electricity supply in the NEM.

And in Western Australia, rooftop and distributed solar set a remarkable new record after peaking at nearly 2GW on the state’s South West Interconnected System on Sunday. Read more about that record here.

Tumbling records aside, Australia still has a long way to go before it hits its 2030 target of an 82% share of renewables averaged over a year – and not very long to get there.

Last month, the average renewable energy share reached a record of 37.5 per cent over 12 months, establishing the new rolling benchmark on the very last day of winter – August 31.

Such is the degree of difficulty of the task ahead that the Climate Council has this week called on the federal government to massively ramp up its climate ambition – to meet both its climate and renewables targets.

In a new report, Mission Zero, the council says Australia must set a new target to slash emissions by 75 per cent below 2005 levels by 2030, and achieve net zero emissions above pre-industrial levels by 2035. Read more here.