Tardy approvals leaving clean energy dollars in limbo
Solar farm and large battery approval deadlines have expired in Australia’s largest electricity market, and despite the improvement it still takes around 1400 days for wind projects to be given the green light.
The planning system remains a bottleneck for major renewable energy projects in NSW; This project requires more grid-scale generation and storage to retire aging and emissions-intensive coal-fired power plants.
The average large-scale solar project now takes almost 1,140 days to meet planning rules, according to a report from the Clean Energy Investor Group.
This was higher than the nearly 700 days for which average approval timeframes were last calculated in 2023, and more than three times Queensland’s typical approval period of 355 days.
Grid-scale battery projects take an average of 614 days before exiting the planning system.
Wind farms are moving through the state’s planning system faster than the average of 3,488 days in 2023, but still taking longer than in other states.
Renewable energy now produces almost half of Australia’s electricity and is increasingly shifting away from emissions-intensive coal and gas.
But the national target to reach a grid with 82 percent renewable energy by 2030 faces headwinds as large-scale projects struggle to come to fruition.
Financial commitments for renewable energy will fall sharply in 2025, halving investments to $4.4 billion, according to the Clean Energy Council’s latest sector update.
Planning isn’t the only bottleneck, with logistical constraints among rising capital costs, transmission and outage risk, and post-approval hurdles.
CEIG chief executive Richie Merzian said planning systems still needed to be improved to speed up decision-making, particularly in NSW.
“NSW charges developers 48 times more for a planning application than Queensland, but takes three times longer to approve solar and wind farms. Something needs to change,” he said.
Steps taken to streamline the system helped, but approvals for large clean energy projects were still “too slow, too uncertain, and too expensive.”
In addition to a review of application fees, the group recommended better resourced development agencies and streamlined planning pathways for clean energy.
NSW developers pay 48 times more in application fees than Queensland and 10 times more than Victoria and Western Australia.
Mr. Merzian said clean energy investors are ready to invest billions of dollars in renewable energy infrastructure in the province, further supporting an economy that already relies heavily on the energy transition for stimulus, as recently flagged by Finance Minister Daniel Mookhey.
Leading energy policy expert Michael Liebreich called on Australia to rein in cost pressures on renewable energy supply chains, particularly wind projects, in a speech to the National Press Club.
“The price has more than doubled since 2019,” he said in his speech in Canberra.
“Some of it is inflation, some of it is interest rates, but a lot of it is not.”
