Renewable investment is being crippled by a failing regulatory structure

In The Daily Fix, Crikey taps into the wisdom of experts and community leaders to find solutions to problems. Today: climate change.

Renewable investment is being crippled by a failing regulatory structure across the electricity system.

You cannot start serious decarbonisation, or the export of renewable power, if you can’t get renewable energy to the market due to a lack of transmission.

Transmission investment must be accelerated and occur such that new generation can be connected to grid and existing generation can be dispatched without being constrained by capacity or strength.

Requiring national planning to occur based on weak and unsustainable government climate policies that ignore the necessary and obvious electrification of transport and industry will leave the nation ill-prepared.

Requiring national planning to occur assuming Snowy Hydro 2.0 will happen on time is a significant and unacceptable risk. A delay or failure of that project due to its scale could be crippling.

Incremental projects like additional connections to Tasmania or smaller pumped hydro projects are of lower risk and should proceed now.

Snowy and a failing regulatory system are distorting the market and delaying alternative investment, creating higher market risks for all, and will result in longer-term higher electricity prices for industry and consumers.

Oliver Yates is the former CEO of the Clean Energy Finance Corporation and ran as an independent candidate for Kooyong in the 2019 federal election.