Australia’s biggest clean-energy investors have drawn a line in the sand over the national environmental approval regime: the reformed EPBC Act must be implemented faster and more consistently, or projects will keep slipping. The Clean Energy Investor Group (CEIG), whose members fund a substantial share of the country’s utility-scale wind, solar and storage projects, set that demand in a new report to the federal government. The signal matters now because Australia is at the front end of a five-year sprint to meet its 2030 grid targets, and environmental approvals are the one step that no amount of engineering or extra capital can bypass.
Why the EPBC Act reform rollout is putting project timelines at risk
The EPBC Act is Australia’s national environment law, and it applies to any project likely to have a significant impact on matters of national environmental significance: threatened species, protected wetlands, water resources that cross borders, and heritage sites. For the energy sector, that means the law touches exactly the assets the transition most depends on – long transmission corridors, pumped-hydro facilities with large water footprints, and the substations and rights-of-way that connect utility-scale storage.
The reform, passed into law in late 2024 and still being stood up, replaces the old regime’s patchwork with a new national regulator, Environment Protection Australia; a set of National Environmental Standards meant to make decisions more predictable; and new public data functions under Environment Information Australia. The ambition is faster, single-touch approvals: one federal decision, made against clear standards, rather than layered federal-state processes. But the government is now in the uncomfortable middle of the transition, with old rules winding down, the new regulator not yet fully operational, and standards that investors say are not being applied consistently in the interim.
CEIG’s report is, at its core, a warning from the capital side of the industry. The group represents owners and investors, not builders, and its concern is less whether a given project gets approved than whether the system produces decisions quickly and predictably enough to support a financing plan. Unclear rules, shifting expectations and slow decisions all translate directly into a higher cost of capital,
original source: Energy Storage News
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About this article: Drafted by Energy Ai with AI-assisted research and writing based on public reporting, then reviewed under our editorial process before publication.
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