Local Content Push - 20% for wind towers in Australia - Tim Buckley - Ep65

Grant McDowell & Tim Buckley– Spark Club Podcast 19 Feb 2026 - Hi and welcome to Spark Club podcast. I'm your host Grant McDowell. We are recording this podcast on the Garigal lands of the Eora nation and pay our respects to elders past and present. Welcome. And welcome Tim Buckley. Highlights Domestic firmed RE deployment The Clean Energy Council's 4Q2025 Investment Report demonstrates a rebound in large-scale renewable energy and storage investment across Australia. The quarter delivered record commissioning outcomes across generation and batteries, strong financial close activity. Five renewable generation projects (1.2 GW) and 5 storage projects (1.1 GW) reached FID during 4Q2025, with total capex >$4 billion across generation, storage and hybrid assets. newly commissioned renewable and storage projects. Nine generation projects were completed totalling 2.1GW of new. 4 storage projects (1.9 GW / 4.9 GWh) became operational, beating records broken in Q3 2025, reinforcing Australia's accelerating energy transition. The forward pipeline remains robust. There are currently 81 generation projects (13GW) and 75 storage projects (13 GW / 35GWh) either financially committed or under construction. This month started with NSW awarding contracts to six huge 8-hour battery projects, including one of the biggest in Australia – the 300MW and 3,500 megawatt hour Great Western BESS, All are due to be completed by 2030, and some are supersized above eight hours of storage. 1.2 GW and 12 GWh of long duration storage, massively further undermining the role of methane and PHS. This week also saw NSW announce an extra tender for more firmed renewables capacity to fill looming coal gap under Long-Term Energy Service Agreements (LTESAs) to leverage the fast to deploy BESS and solar leveraging infill opportunities across NSW and importantly, leverage the Battery boom to get more zero emissions generation into the mix. CBAM KEY TO GREEN COMMODITY OPPORTUNITY: JOTZO REVIEW Professor Frank Jotzo's Carbon Leakage Review Report to Climate and Energy Minister Chris Bowen is finally public. https://www.dcceew.gov.au/about/news/carbon-leakage-review-final-report We agree with the review's finding that measures additional to the Safeguard Mechanism "may be required and desirable over time, for specific commodities at high exposure to carbon leakage risk in domestic markets…. A border carbon adjustment would be the most suitable option in these cases… [to] support the emergence of green commodity production in Australia, harnessing this country's opportunities to be a major contributor to global industrial decarbonisation through exports." It is clear that we need a price signal to drive decarbonisation of trade-exposed Australian industries through the extensive buildout of renewables infrastructure at speed and scale. Critical to all of the above is a price on carbon, leveraging and enhancing our domestic actions so as to provide a stronger signal for development of carbon pricing in international trade, and building on the price signal of the EU CBAM with an Asian CBAM, as we argued in our 2025 report. This would help catalyse investment into industrial decarbonisation at a speed and scale commensurate with the climate emergency and the green economy opportunity. GM - I'd like to pick up on minor issue relating to the design of the REGO in Australia replacing the LGC. The calculation mechanism for the Australian REGO is out of sync with the global standard. The REGO certificate is limited to the 1MWh per certificate rather than down to the watt hour per trading period. Sounds trivial but the REGO has a fundamental flaw as it requires the excess to be rolled over into the next trading period. This volume won't be accepted in the EU, meaning there will be small amounts of energy volume which can't be counted for every half hour trading period for the year. This flaw creates numerous problems as a global energy matching standard emerges in a number of forms;

• CBAMs in EU and Asia
• Green product standards - green hyrdogen green steel.
• and likely changes to GHGP Scope 2 in 2027.

This minor flaw is annoying and with a minor change to the REGO now we can save Australian exporters a world of pain for years to come. Middle Powers Highlight As the Middle Powers are a big topic for us this year, was there anything that jumped out to you since our last conversation? EV Buses in India Tim - KKR investment in electric buses in India. EV busses in India are now 30% lower total cost of ownership relative to diesel alternatives. The 30% cost advantage was enough to get KR over the line to put capital into rolling out EV buses in India. Australia risks being wedged. Australia must be open to international trade with all nations and avoid being wedged between China and the US. Lowlights Whyalla The SA Government has shelved their green hydrogen plans last year, and now the SA Treasurer has overtly flagged their intention to double down on the false dreams of a gas led recovery for the Whyalla Steelworks. Meanwhile this week saw the SA Premier provide a joint Federal-State $20m support for the magnetite mining sector is SA to boost 2Mtpa magnetite mining, a move we endorse. As per CEF's report last year, we think the government should support a multiphase redevelopment of the iron ore to green steel sector of SA by expanding magnetite mining and supporting a new greenfield RE-powered EAF to replace the beyond end of life blast furnace, and to ensure steel supply for downstream fabrication. Secondly our governments should use a chunk of the $500m Green iron investment fund to support semi-commercial scale deployments of Australian technologies to produce decarbonised iron and steel, namely a pilot Element Zero electrolyte green iron plant, a second 30ktpa Calix ZESTY magnetite to green iron plant and a 8ktpa BioCarbon plant, plus incentivising scrap steel recycling within state to feed the new EAF, with the majority of the input material imported for the first 5 years of operation. A phase 2 in the early 2030s would be to build a GH2 and RE powered green iron plant once the economics are stronger, and a path towards an Asian CBAM is better established. Main Story – Local content mandate – Ministers Ayres and Bowen are holding a rapid industry consultation about a new Future Made in Australia (FMIA) policy to incentivise local wind tower and transmission tower manufacturing. CEF has worked over the last year with an industry consortium and we pitched this exact policy initiative to the minister in December. Our recommendation was a policy with four pronged policy

1. A 20% national mandate for wind tower local content, leveraging and collaborating with low cost Chinese suppliers
2. A Production Credit to ensure the policy doesn't increase the cost of wind power to consumers
3. A clear long term volume target of 4GW of new wind annually to underpin factory utilisation
4. Capex assistance for the new factories required.

Interesting to see the EU this week do boosting local content mandates, The EU's upcoming Industrial Accelerator Act could signal a pivotal moment for green steel producers in northern Sweden. New "Made in Europe" rules are thought to require at least 25% low-carbon steel in public procurement and subsidy-backed projects. Green hydrogen-based production, electric arc furnaces, and scrap-based methods are, according to Bloomberg, explicitly highlighted as priority technologies. What's coming up? Tim is attending the community engagement in the Hunter Valley this week, to help build social licence, and then over the next couple of weeks attending and speaking at a number of conferences e.g. Cambridge Institute of Sustainability Leaders (CISL) Group in Melbourne and Sydney and the Clean Energy Investor Group conference (CEIG) annual investor conference in Melbourne, Climate Action Week in Sydney the following week, then the Sydney Storage conference.