When will renewable energy subsidies end?

June 13, 2026

There are economics of renewables. “Getting Worse, Not Better”According to Frank Calabria, CEO of Origin Energy:

Calabria told the Australian Energy Council conference in Sydney last week that the economics of large-scale renewable developments had deteriorated sharply over the past four years, with the cost of building wind farms rising by about 50 percent since 2020 as developers grapple with higher financing, labor, steel and construction costs.

“High transfer costs are ultimately passed on to customer bills or absorbed by the taxpayer,” he said.

“Our problem is not desire.” Calabria said. “The plans are there. The will is there. The problem is the economics – and it’s getting worse, not better.”

Alinta chief executive Jeff Demery also pointed to the sharp increase in the cost of renewables, citing the company’s proposal to develop an offshore wind project in Victoria.

“The reality is that the cost of developing offshore wind has been increasing dramatically over the last four or five years,” he said. Dimeri said.

“When we first started this project, we were thinking we were looking at $2m to $3m per megawatt for installation, which is not cheap. But today the cost was closer to $6m to $7m per megawatt”.

Australia’s largest electricity producer, AGL Energy, has also warned that the cost of wind power has risen, deepening the challenge of developing renewable supplies into the country’s power grid.

“One of the challenges we’re seeing right now is that the economics of wind, in some cases, can be challenging,” he said. AGL chief financial officer Gary Brown told the Morgan Stanley Australia summit. “The cost of procurement to build a wind turbine is increasing. Several years ago, you were probably looking at $1.8m to $2m a megawatt. Today, you’re looking at over $3m a megawatt to build these wind turbines”.

Every large-scale renewable project launched in Australia over the past decade has been heavily subsidized by the taxpayer.

When will renewable energy subsidies end?

Still, Climate Change Authority chairman Matt Keane has called for more public funding for Australia’s energy transition:

“The risk is real. The regulatory environment can be uncertain, and for many private investors, the returns simply don’t justify the complexity”, Kane told the Morgan Stanley Australia Summit. “If we want to change that, we need to be more honest about it and be more willing to put public capital to work in ways that really move the needle.”

“Australia’s emissions reduction target of 2005 levels by 2035 is not just a policy goal, it is an economic transformation agenda. And it will succeed or fail above all on one thing, and that is our ability to mobilize capital at speed and scale.”

“The deals we don’t make, the structures we don’t build, the partnerships we don’t make this year, are not deferred. These are emissions that will enter the atmosphere, regardless of what we promise later.” Ken said.

Meanwhile, Asia is busy burning its own coal as well as Australia’s coal, which accounts for more than 80% of the world’s coal consumption:

As a result, Asian countries collectively account for all the increase in world carbon emissions since the beginning of this century and 60.6 percent of total global carbon emissions in 2024:

When will Australian policy makers finally admit that the global energy transition is a myth and wasting billions of taxpayer dollars on a ‘net zero’ fantasy is a recipe for economic disaster?

Renewable subsidies are high and growing, and we desperately need transparency and scrutiny of where the money is going.