Seven themes emerging from the Energy in Western Australia 2026 conference

Over two days in September 2026, the 25^th Energy in WA conference made it clear that Western Australia’s energy transition has moved beyond the ambition stage. The targets exist, the capital is largely available, and most of the required technology exists.

Seven themes recurred clearly and consistently:

1. Execution is the constraint

2. The grid is on the clock

3. Gas remains essential — but fragile

4. Energy security is now geopolitical

5. Build sovereign capability

6. DER and data are infrastructure

7. Social licence IS infrastructure

Execution, not ambition or capital, is now the binding constraint

Steve Armitage, Project Director at GenusPlus, gave the conference its clearest headline: “WA does not have an ambition problem, WA has an execution problem.” Of 31 Capacity Investment Scheme (CIS)-backed wind projects in the state’s pipeline, only four have reached financial close. Armitage described an “execution wall” between financial close and construction, built from recurring constraints including network governance, grid capacity, long-lead equipment, workforce, social licence and construction capability.

Grid connection is the sharpest version of this problem. Armitage put a number on it: connection represents roughly 7% of a project's capital cost but 100% of its path to revenue. Against 12.81 GW of connection-ready projects, only 759 MW of offers were granted in FY24/25. Every project, he argued, now runs two schedules simultaneously: an internal one (design, procurement and construction) that the developer controls, and an external one (grid operator reviews and outages, government agencies, market bodies, supply chains and Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO)) that it does not. It is the external schedule that determines when a project delivers.

Financial close is not the finish line, that’s where the hard work really begins.

Hamdi Shishtawi, Global System Operations and Flexibility Lead at Accenture; Rob Wilson, Executive Director, Western Australia and Resources at the Clean Energy Finance Corporation (CEFC); and Brent Gimpel, Head of Technology at ElectraNet, each approached the same problem from a different angle: operational capability, capital deployment and AI-enabled delivery. Together, their message was that the sector’s challenge is no longer designing better plans, but converting policy, technology and finance into projects that connect, operate and deliver.

The grid is on a fast, dated clock

Kirsten Rose, Executive General Manager Western Australia at AEMO, gave the transition a firm timetable: Collie Power Station retires from 1 October 2027; Clean Energy Link North energises from 1 January 2028; virtual power plant (VPP) participation obligations begin 1 December 2028; Muja D retires from 1 October 2029; and Bluewaters becomes unavailable from 1 October 2031. More than 75% of installed South West Integrated System (SWIS) capacity is forecast to be renewables or storage by 2033. Rose framed system security as a shared responsibility across government, Western Power, AEMO and industry: identify the risks, agree what the system needs, and deliver before it is required, not after.

The stakes were made concrete by 25 August, Perth’s coldest day in fifty years. Winter demand topped 4,000 MW, Collie could not ramp back for the afternoon peak, Bluewaters recorded multiple outages, batteries entered the evening peak partly depleted, and AEMO was forced to intervene. The system got through it, but speakers treated it as a warning, not a one-off.

More DER is not the goal; more trusted capability is.

That warning is reshaping how the sector talks about storage and inverter-based resources. Cameron Owens, Head of Distributed Energy Resources (DER) and Engineering at Synergy, captured the shift precisely: WA does not have a shortage of installed capacity so much as a shortage of proven, dependable capability. Only around 5 MW of the 214 MW enrolled in WA’s VPP has so far been fully tested under real dispatch conditions. The panel on inverter-based resources extended the same logic to system strength: grid-forming inverters are maturing quickly but are still under-deployed relative to what is technically possible, often simply through a lack of awareness among network providers who default to conventional synchronous condensers.

Gas: indispensable industrial backbone, increasingly fragile firming assumption

Aaron Hood, Managing Director of Wesfarmers Chemicals, Energy & Fertilisers, made the economic case for gas bluntly: WA’s domestic gas supply chain supports major industrial activity and employment, while local manufacturing generates far more value than simply exporting gas as liquefied natural gas (LNG). Gary Bryant, Executive General Manager, Power at APA Group, made the system-security case: gas storage remains critical insurance during renewable droughts, particularly when batteries deplete and the system faces extended firming needs.

We are implicitly banking on a bunch of fragile circularities in our sector.

The counterweight came from two directions. Simon Arthur, Director at Endgame Analytics and an energy systems modeller, directly challenged the industry's working assumption that gas-fired generation is always available as reliable firming. Modelling of actual pipeline data showed line pack already being exhausted under today's relatively modest load, well before hyperscale data centres or electrified alumina processing arrive. Arthur warned that the sector may be “implicitly banking on a bunch of fragile circularities.”

Geopolitics has rewritten what energy security means

Mary Burce Warlick, Deputy Executive Director of the International Energy Agency (IEA), opened with a stark reminder that energy security is again being reshaped by geopolitics, supply-chain risk and strategic competition. Bill Farren-Price, Senior Research Fellow and Head of Gas Research at the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies, localised the point for WA, arguing that Australia’s low sovereign risk and distance from major global shipping chokepoints are real advantages as markets refocus on security of supply and price. But the advantage is time-limited, not guaranteed.

Whoever leads in electricity capacity, secure, affordable, and scalable, will have decisive advantages in the emerging global economy.

Farren-Price localised the picture, framing repeated supply and price shocks as “a new normal since 2021” and describing the Hormuz crisis as an existential threat to Qatari and United Arab Emirates (UAE) LNG exports—large integrated projects that are extremely difficult to restart once shipping through the Strait stops. He closed on WA's structural advantage: as markets pivot from sustainability back toward security of supply and price, Australia's near-zero sovereign risk and distance from every major global chokepoint—Hormuz, Bab-el-Mandeb, Suez and the Panama Canal—position it to pick up market share. It is a genuine advantage, but one that could soften quickly if Qatari supply is restored.

Australia cannot wish into existence the materials and products our economy relies on

Industry speakers gave this geopolitical framing an operational edge. Laurent Trost, Chief Operations Officer at Yara, built an entire slide around the single word “Exposed”. He pointed to import reliance, fragile supply chains and the fracturing of traditional alliances. Trost put it most starkly: “Australia cannot wish into existence the materials and products our economy relies on.” The throughline across the speakers was clear: WA's advantages are real, but they are relative and time-limited, not structural guarantees.

Sovereign industrial capability — don't just export the problem

Trost put the counter-narrative bluntly: WA keeps exporting raw inputs and importing finished products, then calling the resulting industrial hollowing-out “decarbonisation.” The Pilbara ammonia plant manager stated the argument most directly: “a factory closure is not an abatement technology.” If a refinery or chemical plant closes and production simply moves overseas, Australia hasn't decarbonised, it has exported the emissions, now has to import the product, and has weakened its own industrial base in the process.

Beyond Zero Emissions' review of WA's renewable energy industrial precincts gave this argument hard numbers: Kwinana has delivered only 205MW of renewables and batteries in five years against its 2030 coal-closure target, and the Pilbara has only about 9% of the renewables and 2% of the storage its own transition plan assumes will exist. In both regions, funding overwhelmingly favours new, future industries (green hydrogen, critical minerals) while active decarbonisation of existing industry remains a one-off-grant exercise.

Masoud Abshar, Managing Director of Magellan Power, delivered the sharpest version of the rebuttal, arguing WA has effectively “won the geological lottery” but keeps failing to capture the downstream value that comes with it, producing roughly one billion tonnes of ore a year while importing almost all the batteries, power electronics and control systems that ore ultimately enables elsewhere. His proposed corrective, a “4R” framework—repair, refurbish, repurpose and recycle—for retired batteries, was pitched deliberately as industrial policy, not waste management: “don't measure success only in tonnes.”

Customers, DER and data are becoming system infrastructure

Owens argued WA is already operating the future energy system, and that the value of distributed energy resources has shifted from passive customer value—a cheaper power bill—to active system capability: a resource the operator can call on. His summary line, “more DER is not the goal, more trusted capability is,” recurred throughout the conference as shorthand for this shift.

Shishtawi drew the same conclusion from an international vantage point, walking through Great Britain's work on flexibility maturity and data foundations, the Netherlands' approach to congestion management and flexible network access, and California's experience with customers, aggregators and DER participation. His broader point was that data is becoming critical infrastructure, and integration is becoming more valuable than innovation. The hard part is no longer inventing new technology; it is making existing pieces work together as one system.

Jai Thomas, Deputy Director General and Coordinator of Energy at the WA Department of Energy and Economic Diversification, covered the market-signal side, sharpening the incentives that get storage and flexibility to show up when and where the system actually needs them. Gimpel's session on artificial intelligence (AI) and the connection queue made the practical case for treating data and automation as infrastructure investments in their own right, not just information technology (IT) projects sitting alongside the “real” energy build.

Data is becoming critical infrastructure. Integration is becoming more valuable than innovation.

Social licence is the licence to grow

Amber-Jade Sanderson, Minister for Energy and Decarbonisation, gave a clear insight into the government’s position on WA’s clean energy future, both locally and in the regions, saying that the public owned the transition.

Ed Coper, Chief Executive Officer of Populares, made social licence the conference's most quoted theme. His central finding was that community support for renewable energy is strong but easily disrupted, and there is a significant, measurable gap between actual and perceived support. Coper's broader argument was structural: opposition to energy infrastructure is organised, well-resourced and internationally coordinated. The same campaign branding turns up, almost unchanged, in Germany, the United States and even the Illawarra, while a burning transmission tower will always travel further on social media than the best policy paper ever will.

Trust, relationships and community acceptance are project infrastructure

Armitage made the identical point: “trust, relationships and community acceptance are project infrastructure,” as real and as necessary to schedule as a transformer or a transmission corridor. Troy Eaton, Co-Chair of Nyamal Aboriginal Corporation, and Cat Holland, Senior Consultant at Indigenous Energy Australia, argued that relationships, not corporate brands, are what determine whether a project succeeds, and that many communities are now seeking real ownership stakes in projects on their own Country.

Jop van Hattum, Chief Executive Officer of Gingerah Energy, described Project Meridien, built around an early, foundational partnership with the Karajarri people. Krystal Skinner, Chief Executive Officer of Horizon Power, outlined a place-based, town-by-town approach to regional service. Both were examples of the same principle in practice: social licence secured early, as a foundation.

WA’s challenge is now delivery: building transmission, keeping firming credible, strengthening industry, and maintaining public trust.

Brad McIlroy is the Director of Entellus Energy and Strategic Projects Director for Nu-phase. He chairs the conference committee for the Western Australian branch of the Australian Institute of Energy (AIE).