Image source: ABC News

The conflict in Iran and resulting impacts on global energy security have provided policy makers with another example of Australia’s tenuous supply chains and the public’s scarcity mindset during a time of crisis.

The lucky folks that had the foresight to stack generous rooftop solar feed-in tariffs, electric vehicle incentives and more recently, household battery rebates, may have indulged in a healthy dose of schadenfreude over the past fortnight.

Government decision makers may be drawing on their peripheral vision as well, in order to chart a course through a maze of inflationary pressures, public restlessness and uncertain geopolitics.

By making the leap into the energy transition, WA has as much to gain as any jurisdiction.  And unlike many other jurisdictions, this process has well and truly commenced.

In a theoretical environment that was insulated from external shocks, WA’s transformation of the SWIS would move away from coal fired generation, with gas providing a bridge for the advent of long-duration energy storage.

In this scenario, while firming capacity comes online over the coming decade, the build-out of large-scale wind and solar is stitched together to take advantage of an immense pool of renewable energy that the continent is blessed with.  

Alongside this fundamental change to the world’s largest islanded electricity grid, the staggeringly low costs of firmed renewables can support the industrial decarbonisation that will power mine sites, heavy haulage and new manufacturing of green products, such as iron, ammonia and e-fuels.

Simple, right?

But the perfect pathway doesn’t exist. And given global affairs, the current crisis will be overshadowed by the next one, as sure as the current one followed the last one.

ReGen has highlighted previously that public confidence in WA’s energy transition is only as strong as the next outage.  This explains the uncomfortable but necessary step of retaining coal generation beyond 2030 and the greater comfort in backing gas fired peaking plants to provide reliability.

It is a sharp irony that as the SWIS transforms, it may rely more heavily on the very generation sources that it is moving away from.

For proponents, there is an important window of opportunity to progress proposals that address both energy security and decarbonisation.  As time moves on, these two factors are being increasingly seen as inseparable.

As outlined above, WA has comparative advantages that government and industry both publicly vouch for – geology, geography and geopolitics. But these only mean something, beyond a feelgood statement, if they are taken advantage of.

A range of bold ‘first-of-a-kind’ proposals are circling WA presently, if governments, industry and the community are willing to take some risk.

The recent announcement of adjusted investment settings via the $5 billion Net Zero Fund, to be deployed by the Commonwealth’s special investment vehicles, alongside stated intent to activate strategic industrial land across WA, can facilitate the type of investment that shepherds new industries through a daunting commercialisation phase.  

Rather than viewing the current conflict and economic strain as a reason to defer this type of industrial policy, it should serve as another reminder that energy security, along with the mutual objectives of affordability, reliability and sustainability, is entwined with the industrial decarbonisation opportunities that WA can grasp over the coming decades.