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Hi and welcome to your climate data briefing. I don't usually write to you on a Monday morning, but wrangling this edition has been like stuffing octopi into a box. Hopefully you’ll find it useful! Amid all the noise of election promises and Trump's tariffs, an important macro trend quietly took shape last week. The Global Energy Monitor (GEM) updated its coal plant tracker. The headline: New coal capacity has fallen to its lowest level in two decades. It’s a datapoint that's especially rel

A big update landed this week, with the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) releasing its 2024 figures on energy capacity. The headline: a massive jump in global renewables capacity. But China’s progress not only dwarfs everyone else’s—it masks weaker performances elsewhere. Let’s take a look. 💡Key Datapoint: 42% China’s share of the world’s renewable energy capacity. Why Capacity Matters Capacity refers to the maximum potential output of energy infrastructure—such as solar pan

Hi and welcome to your climate data briefing. Last week, we explored battery power, focusing on utility-scale batteries linked to the National Electricity Market. Catch-up here. But that’s only part of the story. Grid data misses smaller home battery systems — often paired with solar panels — that operate ‘behind the meter.’  Let’s dig into that.  Home Battery Uptake Around 127,698 Australian homes and businesses have installed small-scale battery systems alongside solar panels (source: CE

Here’s something we can all agree on: sometimes, the wind doesn’t blow, and the sun doesn’t shine. As powerful and cheap as wind power and solar power might be, they are ‘variable’ or ‘intermittent’ sources of energy. Intermittency is a pressing issue in the energy transition. Critics argue it makes renewables too unreliable to provide baseload power. The Coalition tends to dog whistle this by using the term ‘intermittent energy’ instead of ‘renewable energy’. (There are a few instances in this

Last week, we published fresh data about greenhouse gas emissions from Australia's biggest companies. Why it matters: Corporate emissions make up about 85% of Australia’s net total. Here’s how they compared in the last financial year (2023-24). * Australia's corporate emissions: 368.3 Mt CO₂-e (-1.6% vs 2023) * Australia's total net emissions: 434.6 Mt CO₂-e (-1.7% vs 2023) The takeaway? Corporate emissions are effectively Australia’s emissions as seen through corporate operations, undersco

Hi, and welcome to your climate data briefing. We love a data-filled Friday, and today definitely delivered. This afternoon, the government published Australia’s latest quarterly emissions update, showing a 0.3% rise in net emissions for the year to December 2024. But before reading too much into that, consider the details below. Earlier, the Clean Energy Regulator released a year’s worth of corporate emissions data. We’ll dive into that in next week’s briefing. Meanwhile, we’ve launched the

Hi, and welcome to your climate data briefing. The backlash against green policies—the so-called ‘greenlash’—emerged in 2024 and may be gaining momentum. How much is signal, and how much is noise? In the coming briefings, we’ll explore it through various lenses—financial, legal, political, and corporate among them. Each briefing starts with a single datapoint that could signal a greenlash and then zooms out to the broader picture.   Today, we focus on the banks.   Let’s begin. The Story:

Hi and welcome to your first climate data briefing for 2025. Far from taking a break, we’ve been as busy as ever. 🐝 There's plenty to update you on in the coming weeks—with one piece of news at the end of this newsletter. Cast your mind back to our final briefing last year, in which we saw solar and EV adoption follow opposite geographic trends: solar uptake rises as you move away from urban centres, while EV ownership increases closer to the city. But around the edges of capital cities, a 'h