Australia can be powered 100% by renewables by early 2030s, says Garnaut

Leading economist and climate change policy expert Professor Ross Garnaut says that Australia could be powered 100 per cent by “intermittent” renewables by the early 2030s, and have a grid that is both reliable and secure and cheaper than it is now. In the third of a series of six public lectures being delivered by Garnaut in the lead up to the next election, Garnaut says a grid powered by wind and solar, and backed by storage and demand management, could be achieve quite quickly, but it would require the “train wreck” of regulatory failures to be fixed. “I now have no doubt that intermittent renewables could meet 100 per cent of Australia’s electricity requirements by the 2030s, with high degrees of security and reliability, and at wholesale prices much lower than any experienced in Australia over the past decade,” Garnaut says in his talk last week at the University of Melbourne. “More importantly, I now have no doubt that with well designed policy support, firm power in globally transformative quantities could be supplied to industrial locations in each State at globally competitive prices.