Speech to Australian Energy Week 2024 by Tennant Reed, Director – Climate Change and Energy, Ai Group

I'm here today to challenge you, and myself, to get serious about building Australia's energy advantage.

There is a lot of talk about our energy future. Some is nonsense. Some is better informed, but kept far too soft and fuzzy to avoid hard conversations.

Today I want to avoid fuzziness as much as possible.

Australia has the potential to build a significant comparative advantage in low cost, highly scalable and clean energy from the wind and, especially, the sun.

That could translate into large economic benefits, supporting tremendous value creation by clean energy-intensive industries that meet the needs of a net zero emissions world.

But the Sun is a harsh mistress. If we want to build that advantage we need to work for it very, very hard.

We need to know our path and walk it.

We need to be a place where you can build big things and build them well.
And we need to make energy advantage our top priority.

If we don't do those things we will abandon advantage and ultimately lose our energy intensive industries.