South Wind

Australian service stations are facing their Kodak moment. That’s the name given to the sudden decline in the fortunes of that global enterprise in the early 2000s, when digital imaging took off and Kodak’s century-old film photography business fell off a cliff.

That wasn’t actually the end of Kodak, which ironically had invented digital imaging in the 1970s. After filing for bankruptcy in 2012 it reemerged in a much reduced form. But its fall became an object lesson for all business. No company is bulletproof. Sooner or later, good times will end.

For a century or so, conventional wisdom has been that the high power-to-weight ratio of petrol and diesel guaranteed their dominance in transport energy. Places known for many years as service stations, or “servos”, were dedicated to internal combustion engines, and so it would be, forever.

One thing driving this (pun intended) has been that fossil energy on the one hand and electricity on the other have been worlds apart. Invisible, intangible electricity lacks the familiar smells and sounds of petrol and diesel transport, and unless you own an EV (which I don’t) they may appear strange, even alien.

For all that, Australia’s initially-slow EV take-up is quickening, especially over the five-month US-Israeli war on Iran. We seem to have passed the initial petrol and diesel price spike, but confidence in supply has been shaken and recovery will be long – if that ever happens.

This is reflected in current sales data. Including hybrid vehicles, cars with electric motors made up almost half of Australia’s new car sales in June. Pure EVs were about half of that or a quarter of total new car sales. That was three times EV sales through 2025, and over 20 times the number sold in 2022.

Tasmanian EV sales in June, by the way, were 10.62 per cent of all light vehicle sales – well up on anything previously but less than half the national average, probably saying more about low household income than any innate conservatism. But the EV revolution is happening and old times are gone.

Seeing Matt Halliday, CEO of Ampol, in a podcast conversation with the ABC’s Alan Kohler this month revived childhood memories. Ampol was an expanding Australian brand in the 1950s when my parents saw fit to stick on our kitchen wall a map issued by the company, complete with its slogan, “Be Australian, buy Australian, help build the nation”.

Ampol seems to be seeking a revival of that nationalistic spirit. It’s not the only petrol-diesel retailer wrestling with the EV question – BP and Shell are also active in this space – but the pace of its rollout of EV fast chargers since 2021 makes it a leader in a business still very much feeling its way.

“We think we can make reasonable returns out of this part of the business,… leveraging the footprint that we have to to make good returns over time,” Halliday told Kohler.“That will take time, and so at the moment we’re effectively building capability. We want to get our business model set, understand it really well, and and start to scale it.”

To get the right location for its fast chargers Ampol is tracking fleet and private EV journeys, with departure and arrival points. A point of difference with conventional service stations is that Ampol and others are locating chargers in shopping centre car parks.

Pressed on his company’s business plan, Halliday conceded that pricing would be volatile, having to take account of facts like solar power being virtually free around midday and the preference of many to charge their cars at home.

Besides travellers passing through, he said, there would also be renters and others living in places where a constrained grid made charging difficult. “When you when you combine all of that, you actually do have a relatively large addressable market in our view.”

And the bottom line: Kohler: Do you think you’ll ever own an EV yourself? Halliday (laughing): Yeah, I’m sure I will.

Besides oil supply, a couple of other factors have supercharged the fast uptake of EVs in Australia, energy minister Chris Bowen told Michael Liebreich in the latter’s “Cleaning Up” podcast aired last week.

The fast uptake of home batteries added to solar panels, he said, meant that people charging EVs overnight didn’t have to pay for energy. In addition, new vehicle emissions standards from 2023 plus tax discounts made EVs vastly more attractive for both private buyers and fleet operators.

Current EV sales were no temporary blip, said Bowen. “It’ll just get bigger and better… I think we’re locking in that progress.”

Underneath all the noise of daily news a revolution is quietly gathering pace in Australia, transforming lives and economies. And its leadership comes from the unlikeliest places: accountancy school, retail sales, and a government agency.

In 2012 Julia Gillard’s government set up the Australian Renewable Energy Agency, which took on the shorthand title of ARENA. In common usage that means a place of action, where people are tested and winners decided, and it’s not a bad analogy for ARENA.

Last month Michael Liebreich, the British founder of Bloomberg New Energy Finance and for decades a world leader in marketing sustainable development, sat down in Sydney with ARENA’s CEO, Darren Miller, to talk about the agency’s rise to global prominence in the rollout of renewable energy.

Their hour-long conversation (you can find it on YouTube) was a real eye-opener. Illuminated by Liebreich’s own deep knowledge and experience of the ups and downs of renewables, the conversation unwrapped the story of ARENA from its early uncertain years under sceptical political leadership to now, as Australia’s energy revolution ramps up.

Both Miller and Liebreich take a really positive view of the future of clean energy, an example that’s a lesson to this non-expert who in recent times has felt anything but positive at the spectacle of one obstacle after another being thrown in the path of progress.

Last week on returning to the UK Liebreich told a British audience that those obstacles are just fossil energy’s attempt to claw back support in the face of relatively cheap solar and wind. That cost differential, he said, is glaringly obvious in countries in the global South where oil and gas don’t have the benefit of government subsidies.

This is beginning to have an impact in Australia, where electricity from renewable sources is already undercutting gas power on cost. Following ARENA-funded research that has already raised solar cell efficiency and promises to go much further, Miller is confident that the cost of generating and storing solar energy will be lowered dramatically in coming years.

More efficient solar cells, with Australian-invented “PERC” and “TOPCON” cells leading the way, have been able to unlock lower cost right along the supply chain all the way to the end user, said Miller. “We shouldn’t underestimate what efficiency does for the economics of solar.”

Having trained as an accountant, Miller was in rooftop solar and electricity retailing before being appointed ARENA CEO by the Turnbull government. On coming to power Labor kept him on while raising ARENA’s grants pool to develop innovative technologies to $14 billion over 20 years.

That’s when things really started humming. On top of its solar success, Australia has become the global leader in rolling out batteries for households, communities and grid management, with an installed energy capacity per person over double that of its nearest competitor Germany.

“I like to think of ARENA as a benevolent equity investor,” Miller told Liebreich. “We have the mindset of an equity investor… but ultimately we want to give our money to a project… We’re not investing working capital in a company; we’re investing in an experiment [in] something that’s not yet taken up by the commercial market.”

ARENA’s core function, and a stand-out feature of its business, is knowledge-sharing. “We don’t want to be funding the same mistakes over and over,” Miller told Liebreich. Each funded project has to share its research findings, to speed development times and ensure good ideas get to the market in the fastest possible time.

That principle of information-sharing extends beyond national borders. So new solar panels using those advanced cells invented by a University of NSW team under eminent physicist Martin Green didn’t get to be made here but in China, which can deliver them at a fraction of what it would cost here.

Outsourcing that manufacturing to China is of less concern to Miller than growing ideas. In developing EV charging, for instance, ARENA would bring together a dozen or so project teams together in a room for two days, “and they get to talk to each other and open up about what they’ve done… a core part of the knowledge-sharing work that we do”.

Fresh from from his Australian visit, Liebreich told a UK audience last week that “the great clean energy acceleration” was transforming energy economics, pushing gas aside as the electricity price-setter and bringing prices down. “Suddenly we’re in a different world, at a cusp, an inflection point… Zero marginal cost generation. Incredibly disruptive. Blows up price formation.”

Miller and Liebreich are clean energy crusaders who walk the talk, whose words carry the ring of conviction and are well supported by evidence. And they’re far from alone, more of which next week.

As a record-breaking heatwave rolled across Europe last week Chris Wright, the Trump Administration’s Energy Secretary, told a London gathering that “cold is a vastly larger killer than heat is.”

A former oil and gas executive,Wright urged the UK to embrace fossil fuels. “More people die in the winter than die in summer,” he told an audience of right-wing activists. Climate change was a “slow-moving phenomenon” that technology would sort out. Presumably he means green energy technology, which his president, Donald Trump, has said is perpetrating the “climate hoax”.

Claptrap is a word that comes to mind. It seems comical but no-one should be laughing. The fabricated Wright-Trump climate narrative is deadly serious, with a ripple effect that’s being felt on our own side of the world.

“London isn’t just hot,” UN secretary-general Antonio Guterres told another London meeting last week – London Climate Action Week. “It’s cooking.” And the principal driver of its discomfort was climate change, a product of the world’s addiction to fossil fuels.

Europe’s boiling temperatures, said Guterres, were intimately connected with both the climate crisis and the war in the Middle East. “They share the same destructive origin, fossil fuels, and they demand the same answer: a fast, fair transition to clean energy and a surge in adaptation, resilience and climate justice for those already facing climate harm.”

It would be astonishing, given the (literal) atmospherics across Europe last week, if the views of Guterres didn’t resonate more than those of Wright. We desperately need a stocktake at the most fundamental level, to work out where the effort to stop global warming has landed the world midway through 2026. And then we need the world to pay attention.

But we all know in our hearts that nothing like that is going to happen. In part that’s because the idea of a global authority has lost its shine after 80 years of the United Nations, the organisation of nation-states set up at the end of World War II.

Back then the United States led the UN push, supported strongly by war-weary allies including Australia. Back then the world listened to UN leaders because it was sick of squabbling. But up against a hostile US administration and neglected by a world grown cynical and suspicious – especially in the Trump era – the UN is now a shadow of its former self.

Two people sharing the same British heatwave last week said a lot about how we approach climate change. “Horrible,” a road worker told the BBC. “No shade, no letup… it’s just baking.” “Brilliant,” said a woman in a deckchair. “A few drinks, a few nibbles, fish and chips later – what’s not to like?”

This is a part of the world where acting on climate change, while not without its issues, enjoyed bipartisan agreement until Nigel Farage’s Reform movement became de facto Opposition. Now it’s gone, as it is here, where in the depths of winter a warming climate holds few fears.

But it should. Australia’s 2050 net-zero emissions target and its 2030 target of 43 per cent lower than 2005 have come in for merciless rubbishing – not just by extreme One Nation climate deniers Barnaby Joyce and senator Malcolm Roberts, but also by many Liberals and fossil fuel cheerleader Matt Canavan, now Nationals leader.

The targets are there for a reason. Thanks to some serious slackening-off, especially since Donald Trump’s second coming last year, the global aim of preventing warming from exceeding 1.5C is now well and truly gone, and the real danger mark of 2.0C is looming ever closer, maybe as early as next decade.

The warming shows that at a global level the targets aren’t working. But as a 2026 US-UK research paper in the journal Nature has pointed out, our failure in chasing such goals may trap us in a kind of psychological paralysis, driven by a narrative of failure. Instead we need to focus on what we can do at a national and community level, say the authors, Kwesi Quagraine, Mark Lynas and Erle Ellis.

Europe is sounding an alarm. We need a clear understanding, everywhere, that continued burning of fossil fuels – petrol, diesel, marine fuel, jet fuel and so on – is behind the level of heat now holding that continent in its grip.

For Australia, the best antidote to all that is to redouble the building of renewable infrastructure (a tick for the Albanese government) while bringing to an end the extraction and export of fossil fuels – a massive fail.

And for Tasmania, we need to see something real emerge from our Climate Change (State Action) Act – a law that’s nearly 20 years old. We’re still waiting for the “state action”.