Can the Nationals' plan work?

The Nationals' 2025 energy policy rejects net-zero haste for a slower, regionally negotiated transition. While politically coherent, it fails on its own terms: nuclear costs too much, coal can't attract finance, aging infrastructure won't last. The plan addresses cost anxiety without confronting grid physics. It buys time, not stability - and delay only compounds.

Introduction

The National Party of Australia's 2025 energy and climate platform promises to restore affordability and reliability by rejecting what it calls the reckless haste of net zero by 2050. The new policy is not climate denial - the party accepts the science - nor is it an abandonment of reducing emissions. It is a reordering of priorities: affordability, security, and regional consent come first; emissions follow.

This essay tests that coherence against three measures: Australia's interests, the physics of the National Electricity Market, and the National party's own aims.

What is Net Zero?

Net zero means restructuring the economy so that clean electricity replaces combustion, and balancing any remaining emissions with removals. In practice, it has four parts:

• Clean up the electricity grid - replace coal and gas with renewables supported by storage and firming capacity.

• Electrify everything that can be electrified - swap fossil-fuelled machines for electric ones.

• Use alternatives in sectors that can't fully electrify - aviation, shipping, heavy industry and agriculture.

• Remove the remaining emissions - through forests, soils, or carbon capture.

The Nationals are not necessarily questioning this framework. Their primary concern is with cost, speed and sequencing.

The Nationals' Plan: What's Clear and What's Ambiguous

What They Have Committed To

As of November 2025, the National Party supports continued emissions reduction while rejecting the current net-zero-by-2050 pathway as too costly and unfair to regional Australia. It formally withdrew support for the 2050 target, replacing it with a commitment to cut emissions in line with comparable OECD nations.

The Nationals set an intermediate target of 30-40 per cent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions on 2005 levels by 2035 - lower than Labor's 62-70 per cent, but marginally up from the current 29 per cent reduction. Previously, Australia had set a target of 43 per cent reduction by 2030.

The party frames its platform around three priorities - affordability, reliability, and regional fairness. The platform emphasises:

• Opposition to large-scale renewable carpet-bombing of rural electorates.

• Support for a diverse mix - renewables, gas, storage, and in principle nuclear.

• Opposition to carbon pricing, favouring incentive-based schemes.

• Opposition to expanding Renewable Energy Zones beyond current plans.

• Increased emphasis on climate adaptation alongside continued but slower emissions reduction.

In summary, it is a platform for a much slower, regionally negotiated transition - one that keeps coal and gas in the mix while preparing the legal ground for nuclear.

What Remains Ambiguous

The plan's philosophy is clear; its engineering is less so. Key uncertainties include whether support for nuclear means feasibility studies or actual build commitments, how long coal stations would be extended and at whose cost, whether new fossil generation would be publicly underwritten, and which OECD peers the emissions target refers to. The policy has intent but no operating manual.

Impact on Australia's Interests

On the scale of planetary physics, the impact of the Nationals' policy shift is immeasurably small. Australia accounts for roughly one per cent of global greenhouse-gas emissions. Even if national emissions ceased tomorrow, the change in atmospheric concentration would be too slight to register in global temperature series.

That arithmetic reality is the core of the Nationals' argument: Australia cannot cool the planet alone, so the priority should be affordable energy and regional cohesion at home. On its own terms, that logic holds. But the counter-argument is arithmetic too. Most nations sit in roughly the same size bracket. If every half-, one-, or two-per-cent country concluded that its share was too small to matter, collective action would collapse - and the cumulative result would be decisive.

Australia's slower trajectory matters less as a physical event than as a behavioral precedent. It signals to other mid-sized exporters - Canada, Indonesia, South Africa - that postponement is politically safe. If that sentiment spreads, the global curve of emissions decline flattens. While the direct climatic impact of the Nationals' policy is imperceptible, collective impact if replicated by other nations is material.

Still, in the short run, the practical effect on the climate system remains negligible. If Australia's annual contribution is imperceptible, why pursue deep decarbonisation? The answer is pragmatic self-interest:

• Energy security: A high-renewables grid insulates Australia from imported-fuel shocks and volatile gas-export prices.

• Price: Capital costs must be repaid, but the marginal cost of solar and wind is zero - and once the restructured grid is paid down, electricity becomes much cheaper, laying the foundations of genuine energy abundance.

• Industrial renewal: Cheap daytime solar and abundant minerals can anchor new value chains - green metals, hydrogen, ammonia - turning natural endowment into export leverage.

• Trade access: Carbon-border adjustments are coming; markets will price carbon whether Canberra likes it or not.

In the long run, Australia's energy advantage lies not in incremental emissions reductions but in the prospect of clean energy abundance - power so cheap and plentiful that it becomes the base ingredient of new industries.

Australia's reputation as a climate laggard is already priced in diplomatically, and in the short run trade effects are minimal. The greater risk is opportunity cost: green commodities markets being cornered by faster-moving competitors while Australia delays.

Impact on the National Electricity Market

The National Electricity Market - linking every mainland state except Western Australia and the Northern Territory - is already in a precarious balance.

Before large-scale renewables, big synchronous generators supplied three essential ingredients: energy (measured in gigawatt-hours), dispatchable capacity (in gigawatts), and inertia - the spinning mass that stabilised grid frequency. With large-scale solar and wind, a fourth element has become critical: absorptivity - the grid's capacity to capture, shift, or store the glut of energy produced when the sun shines and the wind blows, so it can be used when it is dark and still.

Already, a large share of potential solar output is lost to curtailment - up to 25 per cent in parts of Victoria and South Australia during peak generation periods - as networks become saturated. When the grid cannot absorb what is produced, solar panels are throttled back, wasting zero-marginal-cost energy.

The Nationals' proposal to slow the transition does not stabilise this picture; it merely stretches the instability over more years. Australians have already lived through two decades of policy drift. If deliberate transition is costly, drift is ruinous - because the grid doesn't wait for consensus.

The Three Fragilities: Capacity, Inertia, Absorptivity

Capacity - the supply gap

Much of the NEM's baseload fleet is over forty years old, with failure rates climbing and maintenance costs rising. The Nationals' instinct - to keep baseload in the system - is understandable, but building new coal is almost impossible. Investors assessing a forty-year horizon must discount the likelihood that future governments would keep supporting coal amid shifting carbon policies and global markets. That uncertainty is sovereign risk in its purest form. Private capital will not fund new coal, and public capital cannot do so credibly.

Inertia - the stability gap

As synchronous machines retire or operate less often, the grid loses its kinetic buffer. Even a slower transition will require synthetic inertia from grid-forming batteries and synchronous condensers. These assets are capital-intensive and invisible to consumers, yet they make voltage and frequency survivable in a high-renewables grid. Without explicit procurement, the system grows intervention-dependent - with AEMO directing units to run for stability rather than energy, further constraining renewable output.

Spain's April 2025 blackout offers Australia a sobering preview. At 12:33 pm on a sunny Monday, with renewables supplying 78 percent of power, two solar plants tripped offline. With too few synchronous generators spinning to provide inertia, the grid couldn't absorb the shock. Automatic protections cascaded, and 40 million people lost power for half a day. The lesson isn't that renewables are dangerous, but that an inverter-heavy grid demands deliberate engineering for synthetic inertia.

Absorptivity - the utilisation gap

Curtailment is already rising as solar floods the network. Opposing new Renewable Energy Zones might placate local opposition but chokes absorptivity - the grid's ability to use what it already produces. Whether Australia slows or accelerates, it cannot escape the need for new transmission, storage, and flexible demand. The physics demand it. Failing to expand absorptivity strands assets and inflates costs.

Implicit in Labor's proposal for three hours of free power is the recognition that Australia's midday solar glut is already large enough to subsidise retail consumption. In this environment, large-scale solar faces an even tighter margin squeeze. Once the glut becomes the mechanism for free electricity, additional capacity no longer finds a profitable clearing price unless absorptivity - through storage, flexible demand, or expanded transmission - rises substantially.

The Nationals' critique of renewable carpet-bombing therefore misreads the direction of market evolution. The economics of saturation, not regulation, are already throttling large-scale solar expansion.

Social Licence and the Nuclear Question

Where coal faces sovereign risk, nuclear faces both economic and social risk. Small Modular Reactors are promoted as cheaper and faster, but no commercial SMRs operate in the West yet, and early projects show cost increases rather than decreases (NuScale's US project cancelled in 2023 after costs doubled). High capital costs and uncertain revenue streams make financing difficult even before confronting community opposition. Even if legislative barriers lifted tomorrow and economics somehow worked, a first reactor would take at least fifteen years. Any site would endure a decade of community opposition, environmental reviews, and legal challenge. No regulator, waste facility, or compensation framework exists. Nuclear can be part of the narrative, but not of the grid before 2040.

The Structural Reality

Regardless of technology choice, the NEM faces three non-negotiable tasks:

• Replace retiring capacity.

• Rebuild inertia and system strength.

• Expand absorptivity so renewable output isn't wasted.

Those requirements exist whether Australia keeps coal, adopts nuclear, or doubles down on renewables. Ignoring them in favour of nostalgia for baseload merely defers the engineering. The grid remembers everything - every closure made too soon, every subsidy promised too late.

The Nationals' plan stretches time but not thermodynamics. Delaying investment in capacity, inertia, and absorptivity does not make the system cheaper; it merely shifts the cost from planners to crisis managers - and ultimately to taxpayers.

Can It Be Delivered - and Would It Achieve Its Objectives?

The Nationals frame their plan around three tests: affordability, reliability, and regional fairness. But the plan's success depends less on political will than on whether it can redirect forces already in motion.

What it cannot change

Old coal will still retire - age and rising maintenance costs make closures inevitable. New coal remains uncompetitive: it cannot match the economics of renewables plus storage plus peak-only gas. Nuclear is too expensive per MWh and too slow to build. The 4+ million homes with rooftop solar create a permanent daytime supply glut that no policy can reverse. And the grid's technical requirements - for capacity, inertia, and absorptivity - remain non-negotiable whether emissions policy exists or not.

What slowing down achieves

The policy alters tempo, not the destination. Coal stays online longer through subsidies and capacity payments. Gas plays a larger bridging role. Large-scale renewables construction slows. Transmission build slows at the margins. But the underlying trajectory - toward renewables-and-storage with gas flexibility - is determined by cost curves and aging infrastructure, not government targets.

The risks

This slower path buys time until something breaks - a major coal failure, a gas constraint, or a heatwave exposing inadequate firming. Then crisis forces expensive emergency measures. Delay doesn't make the grid different; it makes it weaker: older coal, higher costs, depleted delivery capacity, rising reliability stress.

The impossibility triangle

Ultimately, the plan cannot reconcile its own objectives. Nuclear is too expensive and slow for affordability or 2030s reliability. New coal can't attract capital without guarantees governments can't credibly offer. Old coal is too fragile for long-term reliability. That triangle cannot close. The system can limp through the late 2020s, but by the mid-2030s it faces a cliff.

The Nationals' plan addresses cost anxiety without confronting the physics of aging infrastructure or the economics making new baseload uncompetitive. It can make the transition slower and more regionally negotiated - but it cannot fundamentally redirect where the grid is headed.

Conclusion

The Nationals' climate and energy policy is less a roadmap than a holding pattern. Its effect on the world climate is immeasurably small; on trade, modest and slow-burn; on the grid, messy and compounding. Its success depends on whether delay itself can be a virtue - whether time bought for the regions offsets time lost for the system.

The Nationals' plan inherits a grid already weakened by ageing generators, thin transmission links, falling system strength and increasing curtailment. But instead of addressing this fragility, it slows the very investments needed to reverse it. And because rooftop solar now dominates daytime supply, any attempt to keep more baseload running - or to build more baseload - simply adds capacity the market no longer needs or wants to pay for.

In the short term, the Nationals' plan may deliver political peace and temporary stability. But the forces reshaping the grid - collapsing coal reliability, the sheer scale of rooftop solar, the rising need for firming and system strength - continue regardless of policy tempo. Delay does not pause these trends; it allows them to compound. Eventually, a failure of infrastructure, markets, or weather-exposed demand will force the issue.

Even if the rest of the world goes slow on clean energy, Australia should continue to pursue the transition to a renewables-plus-storage-plus-gas-backup model. The transition is not a climate sacrifice; it is the pathway to energy abundance - cheaper electricity, greater energy security and industrial renewal. It can be cheap over time because the marginal cost of renewable energy is close to zero and Australia has abundant solar and wind, once the firming and transmission that make it reliable are in place. From where we are now, the climate benefits are welcome, but the economics alone justify the journey: abundance over austerity, and enlightened self-interest over passive reliance on global coordination.