Victoria wants 95 per cent renewable electricity by 2035. Tasmania is already past 100 per cent and chasing 200. Queensland, depending on who you ask this month, doesn’t really have a bankable target at all. Three states, three entirely different realities, and that’s before you even get to New South Wales, South Australia or the two jurisdictions that sit outside the National Electricity Market altogether.
State renewable energy targets get quoted in press releases like they’re comparable. They’re not.
Some are legislated. Some are aspirational. Some measure generation, some measure capacity, some measure net exports after accounting for gas backup nobody likes to mention. The honest read is that Australia doesn’t have a renewable energy target so much as six overlapping experiments running at different speeds, funded by different balance sheets, and answerable to different electorates. Follow the money in each state and you get a much better picture than following the press release.
Six states, six different maths #
Start with the raw numbers, because they’re worth having in one place. Victoria’s legislated Renewable Energy Target sits at 65 per cent by 2030 and 95 per cent by 2035, backed by the Renewable Energy (Jobs and Investment) Act. New South Wales runs on the Electricity Infrastructure Investment Act 2020, which doesn’t set a single renewable percentage so much as a build-out schedule across five declared Renewable Energy Zones, aiming for roughly 12 gigawatts of new generation and 2 gigawatts of long-duration storage this decade. South Australia is already sitting near, and on some windy, sunny days above, net 100 per cent renewable supply, and has been talking for a couple of years now about becoming a net exporter rather than just self-sufficient. Tasmania hit its 100 per cent renewable generation target years ago and is now running the more ambitious “Battery of the Nation” pitch, effectively 200 per cent of its own demand, with the surplus meant to flow north.
Queensland is the outlier, and not in a good way. The Palaszczuk government’s 2022 Queensland Energy and Jobs Plan set an 80 per cent renewable target for 2035 anchored by two enormous pumped hydro projects. The Crisafulli government elected in October 2024 shelved the flagship Pioneer-Burdekin pumped hydro scheme within months of taking office and has been reworking the state’s energy roadmap since. We wrote about that shift in detail in Queensland’s energy plan: pumped hydro and public ownership, and the short version is that a state target only means something if the project pipeline behind it survives a change of government. Queensland’s didn’t, not fully.
Victoria’s number is the boldest, but is it credible #
Ninety-five per cent by 2035 is an aggressive number for a state that still leans on Yallourn and Loy Yang for a meaningful share of its winter demand. Victoria is betting heavily on offshore wind in Gippsland to do the heavy lifting that onshore wind and rooftop solar can’t, with a targeted 2 gigawatts operating by 2032 and 9 gigawatts by 2040. That’s a genuinely large number for an industry that, globally, has had a rough few years on costs and supply chains. We’ve covered the mechanics of that trade-off in offshore wind: fixed-bottom versus floating turbines, and the Gippsland zone is fixed-bottom territory, which helps the economics but doesn’t remove the construction risk.
The honest read on Victoria is that the 2030 number, 65 per cent, is achievable on current build rates. The 2035 number is a stretch target that depends on offshore wind timelines nobody in this country has actually proven yet. I’d rather see the state hit 80 per cent on time than 95 per cent three years late, and I suspect that’s roughly what will happen.
NSW plays the long game with renewable energy zones #
New South Wales never bothered with a single flashy percentage. Instead it built a market mechanism, the Electricity Infrastructure Investment Act, that auctions long-term revenue underwriting to generation and storage projects inside declared zones like the Central-West Orana, New England and Hunter-Central Coast REZs. It’s less exciting on a press release but arguably more durable, because it’s structured as contracts rather than aspiration.
The state’s approach also overlaps heavily with the federal Capacity Investment Scheme, and we’ve asked before whether that national mechanism is quietly doing the picking that state schemes used to do themselves; see is the Capacity Investment Scheme quietly picking winners? for the longer argument. NSW’s REZ model has attracted real capital, including projects like ACEN’s New England Solar development near Uralla, which we profiled in ACEN Australia: the Philippines-backed builder behind New England Solar. The state doesn’t publish a headline renewable percentage the way Victoria does, but the transmission and firming contracts underneath it are arguably more bankable than a number on a press release.
Queensland’s target that no longer exists #
This is the one that should worry policy watchers most. Queensland spent years telling industry it would hit 80 per cent renewables by 2035 off the back of two of the largest pumped hydro schemes ever proposed in this country. Pioneer-Burdekin alone was pitched at 5 gigawatts of capacity and 24 hours of storage, a genuinely enormous piece of infrastructure. The Crisafulli government cancelled it within its first year, citing cost blowouts, and has since been rebuilding its energy roadmap around a mix of existing coal life extensions, gas, and a scaled-back renewables and storage program.
The state hasn’t formally abandoned a renewable ambition, but there is currently no single legislated number industry can plan a decade of capital around. That’s the practical difference between Queensland and its neighbours: NSW and Victoria give proponents a contract or a legislated percentage to underwrite finance against. Queensland, right now, gives them a policy document that’s already been rewritten once since the last state election.
South Australia already won, and calls it a floor now #
South Australia is worth dwelling on because it’s the state that actually got there. Wind and solar, backed by the Hornsdale big battery and its successors, regularly push the state to net 100 per cent renewable supply across a day, sometimes well beyond it. The government’s ambition now is framed around becoming a net renewable exporter, sending surplus generation into Victoria and, eventually, potentially further afield via new interconnection.
My contrarian read is that South Australia’s target is now doing less policy work than people assume. The state got most of the way there through market economics and abundant wind resource, not through the target itself. That’s not a knock on the policy, it’s an observation that once a grid crosses a threshold like that, the target becomes a floor rather than a stretch goal, and the interesting numbers move to storage duration and interconnector capacity instead.
Tasmania’s 200 per cent and the export dream #
Tasmania is the quiet overachiever, sitting on a hydro fleet that’s been near-fully renewable for decades and a Battery of the Nation program that wants to double the state’s usable renewable output for export to the mainland via Marinus Link. The trouble, as with most interconnector-dependent plans, is that Marinus Link has faced its own timeline slippage and cost revisions, and a target built on exporting surplus only matters if the cable actually gets built on schedule. We’ve touched on the broader firming debate, hydro versus batteries, in pumped hydro vs big batteries: which firms the grid?, and Tasmania is the one state where the answer to that question was settled generations ago by geography rather than by policy.
Follow the money: what actually gets built #
Here’s the thing about comparing state renewable energy targets side by side: the number on the page tells you almost nothing about bankability. What tells you something is the mechanism sitting underneath it, whether that’s a legislated contract for difference, a REZ auction, an underwriting scheme, or just a minister’s speech. AEMO’s own Integrated System Plan models a national pathway that assumes roughly 90 per cent renewable penetration in the NEM by mid-century, but it doesn’t assume every state gets there at the same speed or by the same route, and it explicitly flags the risk of state policy reversals like Queensland’s as a modelling uncertainty, not a footnote.
The states with legislated mechanisms and contracted revenue, Victoria’s VRET, NSW’s REZ auctions, are the ones actually seeing steel go into the ground. The states running on aspiration, Queensland right now being the clearest case, are the ones where proponents quietly push financial close back a year and hope the politics settles. It’s a bit like watching a batting order that never settled on an opener; you can win some games on raw talent, but you’re not building anything durable until someone commits to the role.
None of this is really Australia’s problem to solve nationally, and that’s worth sitting with. The wholesale price swings that show up on your bill are shaped as much by which state you’re standing in as by what’s happening in the NEM overall. A renewable target only matters if the market underneath it can actually pay for the asset. The Clean Energy Regulator’s own Renewable Energy Target scheme data shows the gap between announced and financially committed capacity has widened, not narrowed, over the past couple of years. That gap, state by state, is the real scorecard. The percentages on press release day are just the opening bid.
— Marcus Wren, Editor
Photo by Ernest Brillo on Unsplash