Australia’s Pacific energy pledges need a new approach

In 2018, Australia joined a consortium of foreign countries (Opens in new window) making an extraordinary commitment: by 2030, Papua New Guinea would achieve 70% electrification. By 2050, everyone would be connected.

It’s a bold vision for a country with an unknown total population (Opens in new window), where only around one in five households currently have electricity.

The ambition and the focus on electrification is admirable. But the mechanisms Australia is deploying to deliver this ambition leave much to be desired.

And, as the Pacific continues to reel (Opens in new window) from the oil shocks associated with ongoing strife in the Middle East, the shortcomings of Australia’s approach to this critical development initiative risk becoming a running sore.

I am a supporter of REnew Pacific, (Opens in new window) the signature small-scale electrification scheme for the region established under the Albanese government. In fact, I advocated for its establishment. However, its approach is based on supporting individual projects, one at a time, via grants. This method can deliver good outcomes in isolation, but at a glacial pace given the scale of the challenge.

Another illustration of the mismatch between Australia’s ambitions and its impact on the ground is its marquee electrification project in Papua New Guinea, Pawarim Komuniti (Opens in new window). Many of its projects are life-changing. But its village-by-village approach just can’t scale quickly enough. The central bureaucracy doesn’t have the capacity to evaluate tens of thousands of individual applications – the scale required to meet the targets.

It is now certain that by 2030 Australia will fall well short of reaching its pledges on electrification rates in PNG. And elsewhere, Renew Pacific cannot meet demand.

Accepting this reality, Canberra should pivot, investing more in replicable commercial models for energy delivery that can be organically adopted in villages, rather than just individual, centrally administered grant-funded projects.

Pacific Island economies are low-income. But low-income isn’t the same as no-income. In effectively all villages, a basic exchange of goods and services does occur, facilitated by local shopkeepers.

Once, these shopkeepers sold just noodles, rice and tinned fish. Today, they sell petrol, electronics, even boom boxes.

Importantly, they sell mobile phone plans in partnership with the region’s telecommunications providers. In all my travels around the region, I’ve never seen a village without a local partner of their country’s major telco, even if they’re housed in a makeshift tin shed.

This network of local shopkeepers is a vital, underutilised resource. These individuals, often women, are natural allies for delivery – nodes of competency scattered across a region cynically viewed as lacking such skills.

It is this network that must be leveraged to help realise Australia’s electrification goals.

In the same way that telco services are sold at the village level across the Pacific, energy can be too. Modern technology enables internet-enabled renewable kit to be installed at a fraction of the cost of other hardware. And it lessens the amount Pacific communities are spending on diesel and kerosene to keep the lights on.

Some might say this is impossible, or that the failure rate would be too high. But any such cynics would need to explain why this network could be leveraged to provide near universal telecommunications access in countries such as Solomon Islands but not towards other development ends.

On Savo, in Solomon Islands, a project I helped conceived has tested this idea. Its early success offers a tantalising glimpse into what might be possible at scale. The Savo project sees shopkeepers in villages act effectively as local energy retailers, backed up by a remote team that can address any tech issues as they arise.

The project (Opens in new window) – launched by Australia’s High Commissioner to the Solomons – has seen dozens of households receive electrification for the first time, at a cost much lower than they would be paying if they self-sourced diesel, kerosene, or their own solar kits from town.

It creates jobs in each village, ensures more money is retained locally rather than siphoned off into the diesel supply chain, and provides immediate access to a village-based technician – the trained shopkeeper – to ensure any technical mishaps are immediately rectified. The provision of energy has also allowed complementary infrastructure, such as freezers, to be installed, enabling a local fish-trading business to flourish.

The Savo initiative demonstrates that working with local agency, rather than trying to supplant it, is a cheaper and, importantly, much quicker way of delivering energy to remote, scale-limited village economies than individual, centrally managed projects installed and operated by city-based experts.

At the COP31 climate summit in Türkiye in November, Australia’s existing initiatives on energy and climate in the Pacific will be up in lights. My concern is that, under intense scrutiny, some of Australia’s most ambitious Pacific pledges risk being exposed as well-intentioned veneers rather than game-changing interventions.

To truly be the partner of choice in the Pacific, Australia needs to work intimately not just with governments but with people and communities across the islands. Its energy pledge is the ideal place to start.