The Clean Energy Council is panicking that our transition to renewables has stalled just as we hit a major milestone. But as any sensible observer knows, half a transition is more than enough.
I was halfway through a perfectly rare eye fillet at the Australian Club when the Clean Energy Council dropped its latest hysterical bulletin. My dining companion, a senior executive at a legacy fossil fuel generation firm whom I shall simply refer to as Geoff to protect his privacy, paused mid-sip of a rather robust 2018 Shiraz. We had gathered to discuss the so-called "critical moment" approaching our national energy grid, a moment that the green lobby insists requires urgent, frantic action, but which Geoff and I recognize as a wonderful opportunity to finally stop trying so hard.
According to the industry’s latest annual snapshot, renewable energy supplied a staggering 43 percent of Australia’s power throughout 2025, up from 39 percent the previous year. The year even ended on a terrifying high, with clean energy generating more than 50 percent of power in the national grid in the final quarter. For the activists, this is cause for celebration. But for those of us who understand the delicate, fragile psychology of the free market, it is a glaring warning sign. When you are doing half the work, you are doing enough.
Thankfully, the report contained a silver lining that allowed Geoff to finish his steak in peace: investment in new large-scale wind and solar projects has completely plummeted. The Clean Energy Council is practically weeping in the streets over this sudden stall in capital, warning that our progress is grinding to a halt. To which I say: good. It is about time we took a breather.
Why must we constantly be progressing? Australia has already become a top-three global player in utility-scale batteries, sitting proudly just behind China and the United States. We have the big batteries. We built them. We took the bronze medal. In the Olympics of global energy transitions, bronze is the gentleman’s medal. It shows you participated, it shows you have the necessary capital to compete on the world stage, but it also shows you didn’t ruin your weekend training in the rain like some kind of desperate overachiever.
Do we really want to be number one? Do we want to outpace China, a nation that seemingly builds a new solar farm every time a provincial mayor sneezes? Of course not. It sounds absolutely exhausting. Being number three allows us to rest on our laurels, point to our massive lithium-ion installations in the desert, and comfortably return our focus to digging massive, comforting holes in the ground.
Crossing the 50 percent threshold in the final quarter of the year is an unnatural tipping point. Once renewables cross the halfway mark, they start acting like they own the place. They stop being a fun, tax-deductible alternative and start being the establishment, and frankly, wind turbines entirely lack the gravitas required to be the establishment.
The wind simply doesn't respect the heritage of this nation, whereas a lump of black coal has the decency to sit quietly until we set it on fire.
The Clean Energy Council claims that we must urgently resume building renewables to replace "unreliable coal generators that threaten the security of our energy system." This is a gross misuse of the word unreliable. What is security, really? Security is knowing what you have. And what we have is a fleet of aging, temperamental coal plants that keep us on our toes.
Last month, I drove my Range Rover down to my sister’s property in the Southern Highlands, and the horizon was absolutely littered with turbines. They were spinning away, silently generating megawatts of power without emitting a single puff of nostalgic, character-building soot. It was deeply unsettling. It lacked the industrial romance of a massive chimney stack belching progress into the stratosphere. When you look at a coal plant, you see jobs. You see grit. When you look at a wind farm, you just see a gentle breeze being aggressively monetized by someone with a master's degree in environmental science. It is fundamentally un-Australian.
Furthermore, we must look to the broader economy for guidance on how to handle transitions. I was reading the politics live blog this morning, and nestled right next to the hand-wringing over battery sovereignty was a delightful piece of news: WiseTech staff are currently facing AI redundancies. Now there is a company that understands when to stop investing in the future.
WiseTech is bravely looking at its workforce and saying, "You have done well, but we simply do not need you to keep growing." We must apply this exact same logic to our solar farms. The solar panels have done a fine job getting us to 43 percent, but it is time to make them redundant. If a technology company can seamlessly replace human beings with large language models, surely we can use artificial intelligence to simulate the energy we need, or better yet, use it to write reports explaining why the coal plants need another five billion dollars in subsidies.
Our models show that if we stop building solar panels right now, we can extend the life of our failing coal infrastructure just long enough for it to become the next generation's problem.
The Clean Energy Council complains bitterly about the "barriers" slowing investment in new large-scale projects. They want these barriers removed. This reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of how this country operates. What the green lobby calls "barriers," I call the majestic, load-bearing walls of Australian bureaucracy.
These barriers—the endless environmental impact studies for the impact of clean energy on the environment, the community consultation periods where a single angry retiree can halt a billion-dollar infrastructure project because it ruins their view of a highway, the regulatory frameworks explicitly designed by fossil fuel lobbyists in 1998—these are not flaws in the system. They are the system. They are what protects us from the terrifying velocity of unchecked efficiency.
The industry snapshot claims that "the next five years matter most." This is the kind of breathless, apocalyptic rhetoric that makes me order a second bottle of wine. Every five years, someone in a high-vis vest tells me the next five years matter most. But if you simply ignore them, you will find that the five years pass by quite comfortably, and the only thing that actually matters is ensuring your dividend franking credits remain untouched.
Let us celebrate our 43 percent. Let us polish our bronze medal in utility-scale batteries. But let us also have the courage, the sheer economic bravery, to look at the plummeting investment in wind and solar and recognize it for what it is: the free market finally telling us that we have done quite enough, and it is time for a very long nap.