Wollongong and the Energy Transition: Steel City Faces a Green Future

Wollongong occupies a unique and challenging position in Australia's clean energy transition: as the home of BlueScope Steel's Port Kembla operations, the region is central to the decarbonisation of Australian heavy industry in a way that few other regional areas are. The steelworks' greenhouse gas emissions, among the largest of any single industrial facility in NSW, and the coal mining operations of the Illawarra coalfields that supply coking coal to steelmakers in Australia and Asia, make the Illawarra a microcosm of the tensions between industrial employment, climate action, and the transition to lower-carbon production methods that Australia's policy environment is attempting to navigate.

The hydrogen economy ambitions that have been focused on the Illawarra, including the Port Kembla hydrogen import terminal proposal that would have made the port a hub for imported green hydrogen, represent the transition pathway thinking that the region's heavy industry operators, governments, and investor community have been exploring. The economics of green hydrogen, which depends on renewable electricity costs reaching levels that would make hydrogen competitive with coal and gas, remain the central uncertainty for the energy transition scenarios that these proposals depend on.

The renewable energy resources of the Illawarra and the Southern Tablelands, including the wind resources of the elevated escarpment country and the solar resources of the inland plains, provide the generation potential that would power the electrification and green hydrogen production that a clean industrial future for the Illawarra requires. The transmission infrastructure investment needed to connect this resource to the demand centres, including the Rewiring the Nation investment that is funding the new transmission lines, is the critical enabling infrastructure for the transition.

The workforce transition challenge, supporting the workers in the coal industry and the carbon-intensive industrial facilities to move into the clean economy jobs that the transition creates, is the social policy dimension of the energy transition that the Illawarra's union movement and community advocates have consistently put at the centre of the transition discussion. The "just transition" framing that has become standard in energy transition discourse reflects the Illawarra's specific employment and community circumstances as much as any other regional case in Australia.

This article was compiled by AI from the sources linked above and screened before publishing. See our editorial standards.