New data released by Bloomberg New Energy Finance confirms that investment in large scale renewable energy in Australia plunged in 2019 as the federal government turned a blind eye to the needs to continue the clean energy transition, and provided no policy certainty.

The 60 per cent fall in investment over the last 12 months – just as the country needs to accelerate the clean energy transition – was also blamed on numerous other issues that have emerged in the past two years, such as connection delays and transmission losses and overcrowding on certain parts of the grid – all of which point to a lack of long term planning.

The federal government has been keen to take credit for the record amount of investment in renewables in 2017 and 2018 – largely the result of the renewable energy target introduced by Labor (with support from the Coalition), but which the Abbott government and leading business groups and the fossil fuel lobby tried to kill.

In the end, the RET was only reduced in scale, but still resulted in a huge rollout of large scale wind and solar farms, while households and businesses also invested record amounts in rooftop solar.

But while the investment in rooftop solar continue to grow in 2019, with total installations topping 2.2GW after a 35 per cent jump over the previous year, the amount of investment in new wind and solar fell dramatically to the lowest level since 2016 – confirming other analysis by the likes of the Clean Energy Council, Green Energy Markets and ITK.

This table above (please click to expand) shows the history over the last 15 years, and the investment drought caused by the Abbott government’s review of the RET in 2014. In the last year, however, wind investment has fallen by more than half half and large scale solar investment by nearly two thirds.

According to BNEF, the fall in large scale wind and solar investment was the biggest in the world. It also came after the Coalition government repeatedly refused to lift its emissions reduction target, talked down the prospect of wind and solar, and was accused of sabotaging climate talks in Madrid by claiming credits for emissions reduction it had not achieved.