Essay by Eric Worrall
The cost will be between A $500 billion to $1.5 trillion, but the government assures us there will be no impact on energy prices.
Independent advice spells out mammoth task ahead for government to reach 2035 target
By political reporters Maani Truu and Tom Crowley
In short:
The independent Climate Change Authority has warned achieving even the bottom end of Labor’s new 2035 climate goal “won’t be easy”.
Within a decade, 20 times as many electric vehicles will be needed and twice as many rooftop solar panels, while wind capacity would need to be quadrupled.
What’s next?
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese will travel to New York this weekend for the United Nations General Assembly, where along with other nations, he will update Australia’s commitment under the Paris Agreement.
Australia would need twice as many rooftop solar panels, 20 times as many electric vehicles and almost all of its power generated by renewables within a decade to reach even the bottom end of Labor’s new 2035 climate goal.
It would also need to embark on a mammoth program of tree planting to counteract emissions from heavy industry and agriculture, but would escape a dramatic spike in household energy prices if it could do so, according to advice provided to the government.
After months of speculation, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese on Thursday announced Australia would pledge to reduce its emissions by between 62 and 70 per cent on 2005 levels at next week’s United Nations meeting in New York.
That target, which Mr Albanese said was “responsible” and backed by a “practical plan”, would lift Australia’s climate ambition. Environment groups have decried it as too low, while business groups say it is feasible but will be difficult to meet.
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Failure to reach near-completion of the renewables rollout, Treasury warned, would have drastic consequences for power prices because of the looming closure of Australia’s ageing fleet of coal fired plants.
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Read more: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-09-19/the-task-ahead-to-reach-2035-emissions-target/105789538
The coal closure is a reference to Albanese’s claim that coal plants are not being replaced because coal is no longer an economically viable fuel. I guess someone forgot to tell Australia’s export customers.
This plan fails on so many levels.
Large tracts of Australia are simply unsuitable for EVs. They are barely suitable for diesel 4WD. Travel even a few miles away from the major roads, like the video below, and your automobile gets thrown around by broken, poorly maintained road surfaces. And we all know how much EV batteries like being bumped and thrown about.
Even if Australia did manage to switch to EVs en-masse, where is the energy coming from? Australia consumes around 1050000 barrels of oil per day. Each barrel of oil contains 1.7 Megawatt Hours of energy. To convert that into equivalent generation of electricity:
1050000 barrels / 86400 seconds per day x 1700000 watt hours x 3600 seconds in an hour = 74,375,000,000 watts of energy to replace all that oil, or 74 Gigawatts of new electricity generation capacity.
Obviously you could refine this calculation, by applying a thermal efficiency of burning oil of 25-40%, but charging batteries incurs losses as well, especially if you have to time shift the energy used to charge those batteries.
Australia currently has around 30 gigawatts of mostly coal and gas generation capacity. This would have to be converted to around a hundred gigawatts of renewable capacity, just to run the EV fleet. And we haven’t even begun to calculate electrification of industry and home heating.
In these days of AI, you don’t even have to be able to do the math to get this answer. I asked ChatGPT the following:
How much electricity generation capacity in gigawatts would be required to fully electrify Australian industry, households and vehicle transport?
Short answer — order of magnitude: ~60–70 GW (central estimate) of continuous generation capacity — roughly 590 TWh/year of electricity — would be needed to fully electrify households, industry (manufacturing + mining) and road/vehicle transport in Australia, using plausible efficiency assumptions.
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GW numbers here are for average annual energy delivered continuously; the required installed nameplate capacity (especially for renewables + storage) would be higher.
Source: https://chatgpt.com/share/68cc6ae8-0de8-800c-83c8-71bb58936e64
ChatGPT’s figure of 60-70GW is lower than my estimate of 100 GW of renewable capacity, so lets go with ChatGPT’s numbers.
I then asked ChatGPT how much it would cost to build this kind of renewable capacity;
If all this energy was to be produced by solar and wind, with battery backup, how much would it cost to create this generation capacity?
ChatGPT said:
Thought for 44s
Nice — I’ll give you a clear, justifiable estimate (with assumptions shown) for building enough solar + wind generation + battery backup to meet the ~594 TWh/yr electrification target from our earlier calculation (≈67.8 GW average load).
Short answer (headline)
Capital cost (central case, 60% solar / 40% wind by energy, 8-hour battery fleet):
~USD 501 billion (range ≈ USD 301B – USD 762B) — that’s about AUD 761 billion at ~USD→AUD 1.52. ATB+2https://lazard.com+2
If you only build 4-hour batteries: ~USD 365B (AUD ~555B).
If you try to size batteries for 24-hour firming: ~USD 1.04 trillion (AUD ~1.59T).
I show the step-by-step numbers and assumptions below so you can see exactly where these figures come from.
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Read more: https://chatgpt.com/share/68cc6ae8-0de8-800c-83c8-71bb58936e64
AU $555 billion to AU $1.5 trillion of investment over 10 years.
I then asked ChatGPT how much it would cost if we built nuclear power plants to supply this capacity. The answer, unsurprisingly, is still expensive, but significantly lower than the cost of renewables.
If instead we were to build nuclear power plants to supply this capacity, how much would the nuclear plants cost?
ChatGPT said:
Nuclear option — cost estimate (short version)
If you replaced the ~594 TWh/yr electrified load (≈ 67.8 GW average) with nuclear, and assume nuclear runs at ~90% capacity factor, you would need roughly 75.3 GW nameplate of nuclear capacity.
Using plausible overnight-capital-cost (OCC) ranges for large reactors, the capital cost to build that nuclear fleet is roughly:
Low (best-case / low-cost fleet): ~USD 188 billion (≈ AUD 286 billion)
Central (plausible mid-range): ~USD 377 billion (≈ AUD 572 billion)
High (recent expensive projects / cost-overrun case): ~USD 828 billion (≈ AUD 1,259 billion)
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Read more: https://chatgpt.com/share/68cc6ae8-0de8-800c-83c8-71bb58936e64
I then asked ChatGPT to confirm nuclear is cheaper than renewables, but it got all coy. My guess is I ran into one of ChatGPTs idealogical guardrails.
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5) Bottom line / verdict
No — I cannot universally confirm “nuclear is cheaper”.
If you compare overnight capex only, nuclear looks cheaper in a mid-case vs a renewables+8-hr-battery mid-case (because batteries add lots of energy storage capex). ATB+1
If you compare system costs including transmission, long-duration firming, financing/interest-during-build, and delivery risk, many authoritative studies (AEMO, IRENA and others) find a renewables-centric pathway is least-cost for Australia today — but results depend on the assumptions you pick (cost of capital, battery/hydrogen/pumped hydro availability, speed of deployment, learning rates)
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Read more: https://chatgpt.com/share/68cc6ae8-0de8-800c-83c8-71bb58936e64
Just to round it off, I asked ChatGPT in a new conversation how much it would cost to replace all of Australia’s coal plants with new coal plants.
How much would it cost to replace all of Australia’s coal plants with new coal plants?
ChatGPT said:
Thought for 26s
Short answer up front: replacing Australia’s entire existing coal fleet with new coal-fired plants would cost on the order of tens–low-hundreds of billions USD (roughly A$40–A$155 billion) depending on the assumed capital cost per kW. That range covers plausible low, medium and high capital-cost assumptions and important extra uncertainties (environmental controls, mine/fuel upgrades, permitting, etc.). Database Earth+2U.S. Energy Information Administration+2
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Read more: https://chatgpt.com/share/68ccbea6-686c-800c-9088-1e313c769f87
Replacing Australia’s entire coal fleet with brand new coal plants would cost between AU $40-155 billion, a fraction of the cost of electrifying Australia’s economy with nuclear plants or renewables.
What can I say? The wheel is spinning but the hamster is missing.
Something has to be done – Australia’s ageing coal fleet has been run into the ground, and needs to be replaced. There is no getting away from some level of capital expenditure. But we don’t have to spend $500 billion to $1.5 trillion to make this right. $155 billion would stabilise our energy supply, and restore the reliability of our coal fleet for decades to come. Australia has hundreds of years of coal supply just sitting in the ground waiting to be dug up and used.
It took me 5 minutes of calculations, and 2 minutes of talking to ChatGPT, to determine these climate targets are a joke. Even if they could be achieved without blowing up Australia’s national budget, there would be enormous costs for consumers, either through taxes to repay government borrowing, or direct costs for more expensive energy. You can’t magic $500 – $1500 billion in 10 years out of an economy as small as Australia without severe consequences for ordinary taxpayers.
In my opinion the people who come up with these plans are either deceptive or innumerate. Worse, nobody is using freely available online tools to ask the most basic questions. Most of our lapdog media repeats these nonsense targets like they are serious proposals, in most cases with only the most muted criticism.
In a world overflowing with free AI resources which can answer such questions, even if you suck at maths, there is no excuse for not doing some basic research. Our politicians are a joke for proposing such nonsense, and our mainstream media is a joke for not doing a few minutes analysis, and finding the courage to expose and call out such ridiculous climate targets.