ADDRESS TO THE AUSTRALIAN’S ENERGY NATION FORUM 2025-NSW PREMIER CHRIS MINNS
SOFITEL DARLING HARBOUR,WEDNESDAY, 24 SEPTEMBER 2025
MEDIA RELEASE
Thank you to the Australian for having me this morning on Gadigal land, to discuss one of the biggest challenges facing New South Wales and Australia and indeed the world.
And that’s from the perspective of New South Wales, how we get to 12 new gigawatts of energy into the system by 2030.
Which to contextualise, is more than three quarters of the energy we currently produce in our operating coal fired power stations.
I don’t think anyone in my government or in New South Wales or anyone here underestimates the scale of that task, or the distance we still have to travel.
But the truth is, in our state, and from the government’s perspective, we don’t believe we’ve got a choice. We have to do it.
Natural disasters are smashing us in New South Wales. The Northern Rivers are living through repeated, record, almost yearly floods.
And coal plants are old and getting older. And our energy system does need to change.
But at the same time, there’s a way to do it and the way to get there, and we believe in the New South Wales Government that it needs to be orderly, realistic and pragmatic.
A way that manages to protect the energy grid while avoiding disruption along the way.
And that’s the path that we’re taking here in New South Wales.
One, for the simple reality that business cannot survive without reliable, affordable energy, or any gap between the old power leaving the system and new power entering it.
And two, because there’s no faster way to kill mass public support for climate action than a run of blackouts or a loss of faith in the reliability of the energy grid.
We’ve got a social contract here, and more often than not, Australians are happier to see clean energy coming online, particularly if it’s cheaper.
In fact, they don’t just tolerate it. They’re excited about new technology, and historically, have been fast adopters of new technology in whatever field, particularly if it’s on their roof, and the statistics show in recent years, particularly in the bush.
Australians will support these changes with a big caveat, and that is, as long as the lights stay on and the energy is there and the prices are reasonable.
And we’re going to have to do all three in this energy transition.
So far in New South Wales, we are offering the single, best environment for clean energy investment of any state in Australia, as voted by the Clean Energy investor group, while minimising blackouts and disturbances.
One of the leading reasons we were able to do that is by extending the life of older coal fired power stations where that was necessary.
If you want to make a big change, you have to take the long view.
And the truth of the matter is, one of the reasons we’ve been able to encourage investment in New South Wales is because of the political stability and what has generally been a joint, bipartisan approach to some of the energy challenges faced in New South Wales.
Historically, our targets have been jointly shared with the opposition and perhaps up to recently, but certainly historically.
We believe that the last thing New South Wales or Australia needed was another round of pointless fighting over energy policy because investors were telling us that they needed certainty in order to invest.
Now, I’ll admit the previous government’s plan was not perfect. It needed to be finalised with more detail.
So when we won office in March of 2023, we asked a group of energy economists and experts to audit the plan that we inherited and find any potential gaps.
And one of the things they told us, in unambiguous terms, is that we should be prepared to keep the aura ring coal fired power station open for longer than anticipated.
That’s the exact situation we confronted in May of last year. The Australian Energy Market Operator warned us that if Eraring went offline in 2025 as originally planned, we were facing a reliability gap in the market of about 800 megawatts.
If we didn’t step in, we were looking at a summer of blackouts, unexpected price spikes and widespread disruption to businesses.
Now I have to tell you friends that some decisions keep you up at night, but I’ve got to say that this wasn’t one of them. To keep the lights on, to keep new power bills lower and to give us more time to get that new energy online, we stepped in and extended the life of Eraring.
It was the only responsible decision, and I stand by it, and so does the government.
And while our Opposition, the New South Wales Liberals, criticised us at the time, claiming that keeping the coal fired power station open would cost taxpayers $3 billion, I can report to you today, it’s cost New South Wales taxpayers not a cent. Nothing.
As an aside, that process would have been a bit easier if they hadn’t privatised those power stations and forced us to negotiate with the private operator to keep the energy system working. But that’s an aside.
Regardless, what Eraring showed us, is this process isn’t linear. There’ll be moments of rapid change and progress that happened very quickly when technology takes a great leap forward.
And there will be slower moments where we have to be patient and realistic and more conservative with our decision making.
I saw yesterday that New Zealand faced a similar dilemma, and in the process, made a similar call to prolong two of their power stations, or prolong one of their power stations for longer.
And as Peter Malinauskas said this morning, we still need gas to back up the grid and offer firming capacity for the East Coast energy market, but in New South Wales in particular.
He was absolutely right about Narrabri too. I know it’s a controversial issue in some quarters, but the project is incredibly important for our state.
Narrabri could provide half our gas needs in New South Wales, and considering we’re currently producing basically nothing when it comes to gas that we consume in the state, it would be a huge help.
We need that project to go ahead, because it’s absolutely crucial to our industrial base, particularly in the Hunter Valley.
It’s crucial for economic development, for jobs, for opportunities for young people, particularly as they’re dealing with major challenges and an economic realignment in that part of the state.
We don’t need it as an excuse to avoid or delay renewables, but to back up the system as more of those renewables come online.
Gas is a crucial part of the jigsaw puzzle.
Those changes are not hypothetical. They’re already happening. Seven years ago, 82% of the state’s electricity came from five major coal fired power stations.
Now it’s 60% that are coming from four stations, which means that about 36% comes from renewables, including solar farms, Snowy Hydro, wind farms, plus 1 million New South Wales, homes and businesses generating their own power on top of their rooftops.
Every day more solar panels are being installed. More batteries are being plugged in. More wind farms are coming online.
But at the same time, when you consider these renewable projects, they do come with different challenges to the old energy system.
Back in the 70s, one of my predecessors, Neville Wran and the Wran government, when the state needed more power, built the transmission lines and the power generators right on top of coal fields.
It was an inspired decision, made a lot of difference to the cost of electricity in New South Wales, because there was effectively zero logistics or transport costs to the production of energy.
You just dug up the coal, you put it straight into the top of the generator, and it immediately powered the East Coast energy grid, or eventually, when the Keating government pursued that national marketplace.
Now, we’re moving energy generation from inland New South Wales to the East Coast energy grid, and I acknowledge it’s a massive disruption for people that live on that path.
But I’ll be frank, our options are limited simply because delay is death to energy prices and energy reliability.
Of course, like anyone in my position, I want fair outcomes, but delay and more bureaucracy is not one of the options available to us.
The reason is, and the reason we can’t delay is because, like the federal government and the private sector, we’ve got to generate an extra 12 gigawatts of energy, which is the largest amount of energy produced in the shortest period of time in the state’s history.
And if we get it wrong, and the rollout slows down, and we don’t generate that power, two things will happen.
Reliability will be a massive issue for the state and households, and as high as the prices are today, they’ll go even higher than that. We estimate $150 extra for households and maybe 500 bucks for businesses in the state.
Now, some people have argued, and many may hope that we can avoid these costs altogether, that it would be cheaper to ignore the problem and keep the old energy system in place for as long as possible.
And those people, I think, to be fair, should spend some time reading our Budget papers, particularly if they’ve got trouble sleeping.
But in the last six years, we’ve lived through bush fires, floods, and I have to report to everyone that the government has spent $9.5 billion on disaster recovery projects across the state over those five years or six years.
Which is a 1,000% increase on the six years prior to that, we spent about half a billion dollars in the six years prior to 2019 and $9.5 billion in the days up to today, in terms of natural disaster recoveries.
And that’s before you consider insurance premiums, which have grown 60% in the past 10 years, double the rate of inflation.
So, consider our alternatives here, climate change or no climate change. These plants are reaching the end of their natural life, and we have to replace them with something.
New coal plants would cost billions and billions of dollars. New nuclear reactors, even if they were small, modular reactors, would again cost billions of dollars.
So to come full circle, we don’t have a choice. We’ve got to keep going, and we have to crack on with it.
Yes, for the sake of our environment, but also for the sake of our economy and the state’s budget.
We have to get on with the urgent job of changing our energy system and supply, and do it in a calm, deliberate, pragmatic and methodical way.
Keeping the lights on, keeping the trust, while delivering the cheaper, cleaner energy of the future.
Thanks so much.
