Australia’s New South Wales state on Friday said it would invest A$1.2 billion ($850 million) in new transmission lines over 10 years to speed up connections to the grid for new renewable energy projects as the state looks to shift to greener power.
Australia is grappling with power and gas price spikes due to a string of outages at coal-fired plants, a cold snap which has driven up gas demand and record high global coal and gas prices.
“Fast-tracking the construction of renewable energy is the best way to reduce our exposure to these risks and take advantage of cleaner, cheaper power sources,” Kean said in a statement.
More than 50 large-scale renewable energy projects with capacity of 16,000 megawatts have been proposed in Australia’s most populous state, but many of them cannot go ahead without additional grid capacity.