When Australia’s Chris Bowen and Turkey’s Murat Kurum unveiled their “35 by 35” flagship target at Bonn this month – raising electricity’s share of global Final Energy from around 20 per cent today to 35 per cent by 2035 – it was the most consequential framing decision in years of climate talks
After years of climate negotiations dominated by vague fossil fuel phase-down language, here was something concrete: a number, a date, a technology pathway. Electrification as the organising frame for decarbonisation. This is unambiguously the right direction.
But the metric they’ve chosen – electricity as a percentage of Final Energy – is the wrong ruler. And picking the wrong ruler yields the wrong measure. It can actively drive you toward the wrong decisions.
The efficiency distortion
Final Energy is the energy content of whatever is sold to end users — fuel in the tank, gas through the meter, kilowatt-hours on the bill. It includes all the energy that gets wasted before doing anything useful. And this is where the measurement trap springs.
Electric technologies are dramatically more efficient than their fossil fuel equivalents. A modern heat pump delivers three units of warmth for every one unit of electricity consumed. An electric vehicle converts around 90% of its electricity into motion; a petrol engine manages perhaps 20%.
When you electrify a car or a home, you don’t just shift the numerator in the Final Energy fraction – you shrink the denominator too, because you’re using far less energy to do the same job.
Agriculture sharpens the point further. An electric tractor isn’t simply a diesel tractor with a different powertrain – it’s the beginning of a layered efficiency transformation.
Replace the hydraulic systems that drive implements, loaders and steering with electric servo motors and electromechanical actuators, and you eliminate an entire category of energy waste: hydraulic fluid circulating under pressure whether or not work is being done, and the heat losses inherent in keeping a pressurised system primed.
These electro-mechanical systems can cut actuation energy use by 50–90% compared to conventional hydraulics, while improving precision and eliminating fluid maintenance entirely.
Using a conservative ratio of around 2.3 units of fossil primary energy per unit of electric useful service, 35% electricity in the official statistics equates to roughly 55% of actual useful energy services delivered.
The target is simultaneously more ambitious than it looks — and more ambiguous than its authors may appreciate.
Norway makes this vivid: with around 96% of new car sales as EVs in 2025, electricity still accounts for only around 14% of its transport sector’s Final Energy. If a decade of world-leading EV policy barely moves that needle, this is not the needle we should be watching.
A perverse incentive baked in
There’s something worse than understatement. If your target is electricity’s share of Final Energy, you are mathematically incentivised to deploy the least efficient electric technologies.
A resistive bar heater boosts the metric faster than a heat pump, because it uses more electricity per unit of warmth.
In agriculture, an electric tractor retaining a conventional hydraulic system scores better on the metric than a fully electro-mechanical machine that uses a fraction of the energy. The metric doesn’t just fail to reward efficiency — it penalises it.
The better alternatives
Two better metrics already exist. The first is sectoral penetration targets: where commercially viable electric technologies exist — EVs, heat pumps, electric mining equipment, and increasingly electric agricultural machinery — set targets for fleet penetration, not energy share.
Fortescue’s battery-electric haul trucks and zero-emission mining fleet partnerships are proof that even sectors routinely labelled “hard to abate” have moved from theoretical possibility to procurement and execution challenge. Mining and agriculture are not waiting for permission.
The second is measuring Useful Energy — what actually powers economic activity after waste is stripped out. On this basis, electricity already accounts for around a third of useful global energy.
The catch: authoritative, up-to-date Useful Energy data doesn’t exist at the global level. The IEA should be tasked with filling this gap as a matter of urgency — annual Useful Energy accounting, with the same rigour applied to primary and final energy statistics.
A competitiveness test, not just a climate target
Here’s what 35 by 35 actually represents. China moved from roughly 8–10% electrification in 1990 to around 30% by the early 2020s. Europe inched forward. The United States stagnated. Australia has been overwhelmingly fossil-fuel dependent across transport, industry and agriculture.
This is not a climate aspiration separate from economic strategy – it is a global industrial policy test.
The countries that electrify fastest win on cost, resilience and industrial competitiveness. Australia is still choosing its side. Australia still has a choice about which group it joins.
The headline is still worth fighting for
None of this is an argument against the 35 by 35 target. The COP31 co-presidency has done something genuinely important by centering electrification as the primary lens for decarbonisation.
For Australia — a country whose grids are being transformed by solar and batteries, whose EV uptake is accelerating, and whose agricultural and mining sectors are beginning to grasp the layered gains of full electro-mechanical transition — the strategic framing matters enormously.
But co-authoring a target comes with responsibility. We should be pushing hard to translate this headline into metrics that are honest, actionable, and immune to gaming.
Electrification is the right destination. A broken metric is not a technicality — it’s an invitation to game the system and call it progress.
