A review of last Friday’s Business News Future of Energy lunch

By Max van Someren

A review of last Friday’s Business News Future of Energy lunch, from an aspiring food critic and energy system tragic...

Entree was a healthy serve of renewable energy superpower from WA Minister for Energy and Decarbonisation, Amber-Jade Sanderson MLA. She pointed out that the WA economy had been reshaped to deliver major new opportunities twice before - for iron ore and LNG - and it was time to pull off that trick again.

To achieve this would take the certainty that long-term renewable PPAs and infrastructure investment (supported by the government) with “gas as a bridge, not a destination” - but the members of the resources, oil and gas industry panel that followed (Dale Henderson, Shelley Robertson and Bill Townsend) weren’t so sure.

However everyone was happy to toast to the importance of energy reliability, sustainability and affordability and the need for a stable policy environment to attract international investment to WA’s energy system (of whatever flavour).

Next time up was the main course (chicken, in case you wondered) served with a side of greens - a panel on renewable energy’s current prospects in WA with Carla Basden, Nathan Ling and Sam Pearce.

Tasty morsels included:

🥒 The increasing need to deliver significant community benefits to build social licence for projects

🫛 The importance of not losing sight of strong underlying renewable resources as the key driver of project sucess

🫑 The potential misalignment between the timing requirements of new electricity demand from data centres (yesterday) and the reality of project delivery (years of work).

Thanks to Carla and Vestas for being kind enough to invite me to represent Bivios at this event. It left me with plenty to chew over the weekend!