The goal is commendable; the reality is alarming

The Albanese government has been busy over the past week on energy and climate, announcing its 2035 emissions target to reduce emissions by 62-70 per cent below 2005 levels, and several new policies intended to help achieve it.

This goal is commendable. But as Anthony Albanese meets other global leaders at New York City’s Climate Week this week, we think that the 2035 target and our 2050 net-zero target are at serious risk because of policy shortcomings and execution bottlenecks.

The Prime Minister should then be in good company, as countries around the world increasingly grapple with the growing gap between climate targets and actual progress.

Over the past year or so, a team from the universities of Melbourne and Queensland and Princeton University have been updating our own modelling on the Net Zero Australia Project.

Today, we release our latest, key findings as an open and transparent comparator of the national decarbonisation task.

All Australians can review and comment on our work.

These findings suggest that the government’s 2035 target will be a real stretch, and we certainly agree with the government that more than 70 per cent is effectively impossible.

This view is not a comment on the climate science.

Rather, it is an assessment of the plausibility of delivering clean energy and decarbonisation infrastructure at the required speed and scale. Indeed, we think achieving 50 per cent abatement by 2035, consistent with straight-line abatement from today to net zero in 2050, is a very ambitious undertaking.

So why are such targets so ­ambitious?

It’s because most of us just don’t comprehend the astonishing speed, scale and complexity of a mid-century, net-zero trans­ition. For example, it will require us to increase the installed capacity of onshore wind and solar by around seven times and batteries by more than 25 times, while we also build new gas-fired generation to support system reliability.

To connect these new renew­ables, we will also need to double the scale of the high voltage transmission network.

And whether we like it or not, renewables alone will not achieve net-zero emissions under any ­realistic scenario. We also need to expand carbon capture and geologic storage capacity by at least 15 times, increase carbon sequestration through reafforestation, and reduce methane emissions from fossil fuel production and beef and sheep grazing.

All this means that we will have to maintain build rates across several sectors that are historically unprecedented for Australia, year on year for the next 25 years. And if we can’t achieve this for any technology, then we will need to supplement the effort with alternatives that are either already facing similarly un­precedented build challenges or others with which we have little to no experience.

Nonetheless, there are many ways to get to net zero with roughly the same total costs, and these could help alleviate the build-rate challenge for onshore wind, solar and batteries.

Offshore wind, pumped hydro, nuclear and enhanced geothermal power could all play a role without increasing the total transition cost significantly. But we need to confront the infrastructure delivery challenge head on.

First, we must have communities on board. Without a durable social licence to accept the required scale and speed of change, no amount of permitting reform will help. Second, net zero pathways are capital-intensive.

We need capital flows to the energy sector to more than double from about $800bn under business as usual to more than $1.6 trillion over the next 25 years.

The vast majority of this capital must come from private markets, but government has a key role ensuring that these investments are bankable.

And the energy transition looms largest for our industrial sector, which represents around half of the decarbonisation task.

We can see average industrial energy costs rising by more than 60 per cent as we decarbonise, and by even more in some industrial sub-sectors.

In many cases, they will also rely on emerging technologies that are not yet bankable, such as the electrification of high temperature heat, and zero carbon gas and feedstocks.

Governments must support these companies to prevent further deindustrialisation. On the positive side, we expect small impacts on average household energy costs and maybe even small reductions when we include in car ownership. This is an important finding for us all and should temper some of the fear­mongering.

Australia has a limited window to get its climate goals on track. We must be clear-eyed about the speed and scale of infrastructure delivery, the challenge of bringing consumers and communities on the journey and alert to the vulnerability of industry.

Finally, while the government leans in to the net-zero challenge, there is a strong likelihood that the world will not limit warming to 2C, so they will also have to ­elevate climate resilience and ­adaptation in their policy and planning processes.

Michael Brear is a professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Melbourne and a director of the Net Zero Australia Project. Chris Greig is the Theodora D. and William H. Walton (III) senior research scientist at the Andlinger Centre for Energy and the Environment at Princeton University.

Adapted from an article first published in The Australian on 24 September 2025.