82 per cent. That’s the renewable share South Australia’s grid has been running at on an annual basis for a while now, and it sits there as the awkward benchmark every other state gets measured against whether it likes it or not. Tasmania claims it got to 100 per cent years ago, on paper, through its hydro legacy rather than new build. Everyone else is somewhere in between, chasing targets that were set by different governments, at different times, for different reasons, and are frankly not comparable in the way press releases like to pretend they are.
State renewable energy targets have become a kind of scoreboard sport in Australian politics. Premiers like announcing them. Energy ministers like updating them. But a target is a number on a page until transmission gets built, planning approvals clear and a generator actually syncs to the grid. That gap, between the announced figure and the delivered megawatt, is where this gets interesting.
The headline numbers, side by side
Victoria is targeting 65 per cent renewable generation by 2030 and net zero emissions by 2045, backed by the revived State Electricity Commission and a run of offshore wind ambitions off the Gippsland coast. NSW doesn’t run a single headline renewable percentage target in the same style; instead it has committed, through its Electricity Infrastructure Roadmap, to five renewable energy zones and an emissions reduction target of 70 per cent by 2035. Queensland’s Energy and Jobs Plan sets 70 per cent renewables by 2032 and 80 per cent by 2035, underwritten by state-owned generators Stanwell and CleanCo plus the Borumba and Pioneer-Burdekin pumped hydro schemes. South Australia, already near-saturated with wind and solar, is chasing net 100 per cent renewables on an annual energy balance basis and effectively net negative through green hydrogen exports, a target it’s closer to hitting than anyone else on this list. Western Australia, isolated on its own SWIS grid with no interconnection to the NEM, has a target to retire all state-owned coal by 2030 but hasn’t set the same kind of headline renewable percentage the eastern states use. Tasmania’s “200 per cent renewable by 2040” framing, building on its existing hydro base through Marinus Link and Battery of the Nation, is really an export target dressed up as a domestic one.
Put those next to each other and you start to see the problem. These aren’t six versions of the same homework assignment. They’re six different assignments, marked on six different curves.
Why side-by-side comparisons mislead more than they inform
Here’s where I’ll have a crack at something mildly unpopular: most of the commentary comparing state targets is comparing apples to municipal bus timetables. South Australia’s 100 per cent figure is achievable partly because it’s a small, windy peninsula with a modest industrial base and a long interconnector to Victoria to lean on when the wind drops, as detailed in South Australia’s renewable energy record: what it hides. Queensland is trying to decarbonise a grid that still burns enormous volumes of coal to run aluminium smelters and LNG trains, a completely different physics problem. NSW is retiring four coal units in the next several years while its renewable energy zones, as I’ve written before, are running meaningfully behind the exit schedule, a mismatch covered in NSW’s coal exit is outrunning its REZ build.
So when a minister in one state says “we’re ahead of schedule” and a minister in another says “we’re on track,” they’re often measuring against entirely different baselines, different coal retirement dates and different levels of existing hydro or gas backup. Treating the percentages as a league table flatters some governments and is unfair to others.
The delivery gap: where targets meet transmission reality
Targets don’t move electrons. Transmission lines do, and that’s where most of these programmes are actually being tested right now. Victoria’s offshore wind ambitions depend on grid connection work that hasn’t cleared planning in full. NSW’s Central-West Orana zone, the first cab off the rank under the roadmap, is still working through the kind of status check I laid out in Central-West Orana REZ: NSW’s first REZ status check, and it’s informative rather than damning. These things are genuinely hard to build fast. Queensland’s CopperString project, meant to open up the north-west minerals province to renewables, has been pushed out to the early 2030s, a timeline I went through in CopperString 2032: Queensland’s long bet on the north-west.
The honest scorecard isn’t the percentage target. It’s the queue of transmission projects behind it and whether they’re hitting their own interim milestones. AEMO’s Integrated System Plan is the closest thing Australia has to a neutral referee on this, modelling what capacity and network build is actually required under different scenarios to meet state and national targets simultaneously, and it’s worth reading directly rather than through a premier’s press release: the document is published on AEMO’s website and updated periodically. The 2024 version flagged that several state REZ programmes were running behind the pace required for the ISP’s “step change” scenario. That’s not a political statement. It’s a planning document saying the maths doesn’t currently close.
The Capacity Investment Scheme complicates state comparisons further
Layered on top of all this is the Commonwealth’s Capacity Investment Scheme, which runs tenders for dispatchable and variable renewable capacity on a national basis but allocates by state based on where projects clear. That means a state’s renewable trajectory now depends partly on decisions made in Canberra tenders, not just state government policy, and the mechanics of how that actually works are worth understanding on their own terms. I went through it in How the Capacity Investment Scheme actually works. A state can hit its target faster or slower depending on how CIS auctions land, which is a reasonable argument for why some of the more confident 2030 projections deserve a discount rate applied to them.
It also means states are now, in effect, competing with each other for the same pool of developer capital and construction labour. Transmission crews, specialist cable-laying vessels for offshore wind, grid-forming inverter supply. These are finite national resources being pulled in six directions by six sets of targets that were set without much coordination between jurisdictions. Nobody budgeted for that friction when the targets were announced; it’s showing up now as delay.
Who’s genuinely on track, and who’s running on vibes
If I had to rank the credibility of these targets rather than the ambition of them, South Australia and Tasmania come out ahead, not because their targets are harder but because the physical infrastructure behind them: existing hydro, existing wind penetration, an interconnector under construction in Marinus Link as covered in Tasmania’s Battery of the Nation bet hinges on one cable – is largely either built or well underway. Queensland’s target is enormous in scale and backed by real capital through Stanwell and CleanCo, but it depends on Borumba and Pioneer-Burdekin landing on cost and schedule, and pumped hydro of that size has a patchy global record on both fronts.
NSW’s targets are the ones I’d flag as most at risk of slipping, not because the ambition is wrong but because the coal exit clock and the REZ build clock are running at different speeds, and nobody in government has been especially candid about what happens if Eraring and the other ageing units close before the replacement capacity is firm. Victoria sits somewhere in the middle: a genuinely serious target, a revived SEC putting real balance sheet behind it, but an offshore wind pipeline that’s still mostly permits and intentions rather than steel in the water.
What a fair comparison would actually measure
If I were redesigning this scorecard, I wouldn’t rank states by their 2030 or 2035 percentage target at all. I’d rank them by interim delivery milestones hit versus missed over the past two years, because that’s the only data that can’t be spun. Did the REZ access scheme sign up the contracted capacity it said it would. Did the transmission project clear its planning approval on the date in the original business case. Did the storage tender actually procure the megawatt-hours it set out to buy. Those are boring, granular, auditable facts, and governments mostly don’t put them on the same page as the glossy percentage target because the gap is embarrassing.
The AER and the AEMC both publish data that gets close to this kind of tracking, particularly through network revenue determinations and transmission planning reports, and the Clean Energy Regulator’s data on large-scale generation certificates gives a genuinely independent read on what capacity has actually started generating, as distinct from what’s been announced. Anyone wanting the real picture should be pulling from the Clean Energy Regulator’s published data rather than a state budget paper.
Cricket commentators have a phrase for teams that look good on paper and fall over in the field: flat-track bullies. A few of these state targets are starting to look like that, impressive against a benign run of public announcements, less convincing once the transmission approvals, the community consultation timelines and the skilled labour shortages actually turn up to bowl.
None of this means the targets are wrong to have. Ambition pulls investment forward and gives developers and financiers a planning horizon they wouldn’t otherwise get. But treating a 2032 or 2035 percentage figure as a scoreboard, rather than as a hypothesis still being tested against steel, concrete and approval timelines, is how Australia keeps having the same surprised conversation every time a coal closure date gets brought forward faster than the replacement capacity is ready. The states that will actually hit their numbers are the ones already boring enough to be hitting their interim milestones. The rest is still mostly a press release.
– Marcus Wren, Editor
Photo by Lukas Bato on Unsplash