Miller was in Sydney last week after Brookfield became the largest owner-operator of renewables generation capacity in the country, following the completion of the $10.6 billion acquisition of French-owned developer Neoen. The deal came six months after the collapse of Brookfield’s $20 billion takeover of Origin Energy.
Miller said that while Trump’s executive orders pulling back support for green energy had created plenty of headlines, they would have little impact in most areas, outweighed by the benefits renewables provide in keeping the lights on and providing affordable power.
She singled out wind power as one area where a slowdown was expected after an order to cease permitting of offshore wind farms and onshore ones on federal lands.
“Still, if the question is no power versus wind power – and this is what we see over and over again in the red states – the answer will always be, ‘Give me power, and give me power quickly’,” Miller said.
Before joining Brookfield, Miller was a senior counsellor to California’s Democrat Governor Gavin Newsom on infrastructure and clean energy, and had been a vice chair of the investment committee of the $US350 billion California Teachers’ Retirement System pension fund.
It was only five weeks after Trump took office that Brookfield struck a $US1.735 billion ($2.7 billion) deal to buy the US onshore renewables business of Britain’s National Grid, adding more than 3 gigawatts of operational and under-construction solar, wind and battery projects.
Miller also pointed to bipartisan support across Republicans and Democrats for nuclear and geothermal power, and carbon capture, but said solar power – increasingly with battery storage attached – remained the fastest growing.
Secret sauce
The speed at which solar farms could be brought online and their relatively low cost helped them push up through the long queue of new generation projects looking to connect into the gridlocked US transmission system to meet rising demand from data centres, machine learning applications and affordable housing developments.
In April last year, the US had more than 2.2 terawatts of capacity in the queue for connection, about 1.7 times the size of the country’s total capacity of grid-scale generation plants, according to S&P Global. The average wait time was at least four years amid a lagging build-out of transmission.
“The reason why clean energy has become so in demand and remains in demand is because there are huge queues for every part of that [grid] system and everybody is just eager to have the certainty of connection.,” Miller said.
“That’s the secret sauce at this point of renewable energy ... they have advanced queue positions.”
Brookfield’s Luke Edwards, the head of Australia and New Zealand for its renewable power and transition group, said the momentum for the clean energy transition also remained unstoppable here no matter the result of the forthcoming federal election,
“Whether we hit 2030 [82 per cent renewables target] or whether it’s 2035 doesn’t really matter,” Edwards said. “The train has left the station, and once you’ve got the momentum you’re not going to stop that train.”
Brookfield managing partner, renewable power and transition, Luke Edwards. Louise Kennerley
Edwards said that while some investors were opting for nuclear, solar and storage was the go-to solution for data centres, given gas power was too expensive to run around the clock.
“It’s uneconomic to provide 100 per cent renewable power,” he said. “So 70, 80 per cent with fossil fuel firming is the way it goes, and then over time the opportunity and challenge for the industry and us is to increase the percentage of renewables.”
Miller said that carbon capture would have a role in cutting emissions from gas power firming, until battery storage technology advanced enough to enable 100 per cent renewables.
Brookfield has two substantial investments in carbon capture, through sequestration outfit Carbon TerraVault, a joint venture with California Resources Corporation, and Canadian company Entropy.
Edwards said that as carbon capture and other technologies such as sustainable aviation fuels mature, they could potentially be areas for investment by Brookfield in Australia.
