Highlights from the Australian market
- NEM wholesale prices averaged $74/MWh in Q2 2026, a six-year low and 47% below Q2 2025, as renewables hit a record 42.1% of generation.
- EVs now make up almost a quarter of Australia’s new car sales as the Middle East fuel crisis bites, with battery electrics and plug-in hybrids together taking a record 35.8% of new passenger car sales in June and the Tesla Model Y outselling the HiLux for a second month straight.
- Energy ministers agreed to legislate national standards requiring large data centres to underwrite new renewable supply, but Queensland and the Northern Territory opposed the package with the NT instead backing a $40 billion gas-fired data centre industry drawing on Beetaloo gas.
- The Balance Sheet’s Issue No. 13 audit of Australia’s energy economy finds the country exports about three times the energy it consumes and will earn $405 billion doing it this year; yet, household electricity prices have drifted from among the world’s cheapest two decades ago to around the OECD average today.
- The Albanese and Cook governments have put $4 million into a pre-feasibility study for the first large-scale petrol refinery since the 1960s, but experts have called it “dinosaur technology” given the clean energy transition and structurally falling petrol demand.
News from Japan
- The M7.1 Kumamoto earthquake on 28 July cut power to about 32,000 households in Kumamoto Prefecture at its peak, with around 14,000 still off supply two days later; gas supply remains suspended in parts of the prefecture, mobile generator vehicles have been deployed to run air conditioning at evacuation centres in 35°C heat, and the Sendai nuclear plant about 100 km from the epicentre reported no abnormalities.
- Paywalled: Invenergy has shelved its planned 47.3 MW onshore wind project near Hakodate in Hokkaido three months after announcing it, after residents objected over soil erosion, water contamination and low-frequency noise. An online petition drew more than 30,000 signatures ending an 11-turbine project that was to begin construction in 2031 and reach commercial operation by 2035.
Podcast of the week: Catalyst’s Shayle Kann on the commercial battery comeback – why C&I storage has been the missing middle, and what’s finally shifting the economics.