Craig has spent eighteen years as a fitter at Tarong Power Station, the coal-fired plant west of Kingaroy owned outright by state generator Stanwell. For most of that time his job security depended on maintenance budgets and coal demand — the ordinary rhythms of a power station town. In 2024 it briefly depended on something else: a state election. The former Labor government had legislated a timetable requiring 80 per cent of Queensland's electricity to come from renewable sources by 2035, with a Job Security Guarantee for workers like Craig. The government that replaced it repealed that target within its first term and reset Tarong's horizon to run, potentially, into the 2030s and beyond. Craig's job looks safer for it, for now. Whether that trade — a longer life for coal, a repealed target for renewables — is good policy for a state that still has to pay the power bill and meet the climate law on its books is the question this article audits.
A grid built on coal, a target legislated by Labor
Queensland runs one of the most coal-dependent grids in the developed world. At the release of the state's 2025 Energy Roadmap, around 8 gigawatts of coal-fired capacity supplied more than 60 per cent of total electricity demand (approx.; Queensland Treasury, Energy Roadmap, 2025). Most of that fleet — Stanwell's Tarong and Tarong North, and CS Energy's Callide stations — is publicly owned, a legacy of Queensland running its own generators rather than privatising them, as several other states did in the 1990s and 2000s.
In 2022, the then Labor government under Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk released the Queensland Energy and Jobs Plan: a pathway to 22 gigawatts of new wind, solar, storage and pumped hydro by 2035, with renewable targets of 50 per cent by 2030, 70 per cent by 2032 and 80 per cent by 2035. Those targets were enshrined in law by the Energy (Renewable Transformation and Jobs) Act 2024. The Act also locked in a minimum 54 per cent public ownership guarantee for generation assets, 100 per cent public ownership of transmission, distribution and deep storage, and a Job Security Guarantee and Fund for coal-station and coal-mine workers. By 2024, renewable generation had grown from under 3 per cent of the grid a decade earlier to around 30 per cent (approx.; Queensland Treasury) — roughly halfway to the 2030 target. Two pumped hydro projects, Pioneer-Burdekin and the smaller Borumba scheme south-west of Gympie, were meant to firm that build-out.
That was the plan Queenslanders voted on at the 26 October 2024 election. The Liberal National Party, led by David Crisafulli, won government and was sworn in on 28 October, ending three consecutive terms of Labor government. The LNP had promised to keep the 75 per cent emissions target for 2035 and public ownership of existing generation, while flagging a hard-nosed cost review of Labor's renewable timetable and pumped hydro pipeline. What followed, over the next fourteen months, was the most consequential energy policy reset in the state's recent history.
The strongest case
A target that had stopped being credible
Put the government's case at its strongest, because parts of it are grounded in real numbers. Within weeks of taking office, the Crisafulli government asked the Queensland Investment Corporation to review Pioneer-Burdekin. The review found the project's estimated cost had blown out from around $12 billion (approx.) to $36.77 billion — more than triple the original figure — on a site it found carried unresolved environmental and community concerns (Queensland Government, Pioneer-Burdekin review, Nov-2024). That is a legitimate reason to stop and recost rather than proceed on momentum. Even the project that survived, Borumba pumped hydro, saw its cost rise by around $4 billion to roughly $18 billion, with first power delayed about three years to 2035 (approx.; Queensland Hydro, Dec-2024) — evidence, the government argues, that the pipeline behind the 80 per cent target was more aspirational than deliverable.
On coal, the argument is reliability rather than ideology. A grid drawing more than 60 per cent of its power from coal cannot retire that capacity faster than replacement generation and storage can be built and connected — and the government's Roadmap argues forcing early retirement, before replacements are proven, risks the supply shortfalls seen elsewhere during the transition. Resetting coal horizons to at least technical life, backed by a $1.8 billion Electricity Maintenance Guarantee over five years (Queensland Budget 2025-26), is presented as insurance against that risk. The government also cites its own modelling suggesting the reset could cut energy system costs by around $26 billion to 2035 and spare households roughly $1,035 a year against the previous trajectory (approx.; Queensland Government, Energy Roadmap, 2025) — a claim independent analysts have not verified, but one the government treats as the central justification for the reset.
What the Crisafulli government did
The government's actions moved in three steps. First, within its opening weeks, it cancelled Pioneer-Burdekin outright, redirecting Queensland Hydro toward Borumba and smaller alternatives assessed by the QIC, including proposals at Mount Rawdon, Big-T near Toowoomba and Capricornia near Mackay. Second, in 2025 it released the Queensland Energy Roadmap, confirming state-owned coal assets would run "at least to technical lives," extendable where justified by system need, asset integrity and economic viability — a horizon reporting on the Roadmap has put at around 2036 for Tarong and as late as 2046 for Stanwell Power Station (approx.). Alongside the coal reset, the Budget backed two new gas peakers, CS Energy's 400-megawatt Brigalow project at Kogan Creek and Stanwell's 114-megawatt Lockyer project.
Third, and most significant here, the government introduced the Energy Roadmap Amendment Bill on 16 October 2025. Parliament passed it on 10 December 2025. The Act repealed the legislated targets of 50 per cent by 2030, 70 per cent by 2032 and 80 per cent by 2035, and renamed the underlying law to the Energy (Infrastructure Facilitation) Act 2024 — replacing a renewable-share objective with a broader framework balancing cost, reliability and emissions. It also changed the ownership settings Labor had legislated: 100 per cent public ownership of existing generation stayed, but the guaranteed 54 per cent public share of new generation was dropped, opening new build-out to larger private investment through what the government calls the QIC Investor Gateway. The Job Security Guarantee for existing coal workers, including workers like Craig at Tarong, was retained.
The evidence
Three primary-source data points frame what the reset has produced so far. The Queensland Audit Office's Energy 2025 report, tabled 11 December 2025, found sector profit fell by $494.0 million to $131.6 million in 2024-25, with CS Energy and Energy Queensland recording losses while Stanwell, Powerlink, CleanCo and Ergon Energy stayed profitable. It linked part of the fall to reduced generation at CS Energy's Callide stations and a structural revenue shift: generators' share of sector revenue fell from 43 per cent in 2021-22 to 30 per cent in 2024-25, as retail revenue's share rose from 30 per cent to 40 per cent, partly from rooftop solar displacing large-scale generation (Queensland Audit Office, Energy 2025, Dec-2025).
On reliability, AEMO's 2025 Electricity Statement of Opportunities forecast a reliability gap of around 80 megawatts in Queensland for 2025-26 — enough to supply roughly 20,000 homes — from reduced generator availability, higher peak demand forecasts and delayed project commissioning (approx.; AEMO, Aug-2025). AEMO's national planning has shifted the same way: its draft 2026 Integrated System Plan now models coal remaining in the market until the late 2040s under its central scenario, against a full exit by the late 2030s in its 2024 plan, a change it attributes partly to slower coal retirement intentions in several states, Queensland's Roadmap among them.
On investment, analysis by the Queensland Conservation Council of Clean Energy Council project data, published December 2025, found large-scale renewable and storage projects reaching financial close fell from 15 projects (around 1,754MW wind and solar, 1,635MW storage) in the year before the change of government, to four projects (around 240MW solar, 640MW storage) in the government's first year — a fall of more than 70 per cent in project count (approx.). This is an advocacy-affiliated secondary source, not a regulator figure, and it covers a single year coinciding with pre-repeal policy uncertainty; read it as a signal of investor caution, not a settled verdict.
The critique
The strongest case rests on real cost blowouts at Pioneer-Burdekin and Borumba, and a genuine reliability risk in retiring coal faster than replacement capacity can be built. Both points survive scrutiny. What does not survive as cleanly is the claim that repealing the target, rather than revising its timetable or technology mix, was the only way to respond. A government that believed 50 per cent by 2030 was unreachable could have legislated a slower, still-binding pathway. Instead it removed the statutory anchor and replaced it with ministerial discretion over "system need, asset integrity and economic viability" — reasonable engineering inputs that commit no future government to a delivery date the way a legislated percentage did.
Queensland kept a 75 per cent emissions law for 2035. It repealed the renewable target that was meant to deliver it.
That gap matters because the Climate Change Act's target of a 75 per cent cut in net emissions by 2035, and net zero by 2050, remains in force — Crisafulli has publicly committed to keeping it. But renewable generation is the largest available lever for cutting emissions from electricity, itself Queensland's largest emitting sector. Analysis for the Queensland Conservation Council concluded the Roadmap's coal-and-gas trajectory would likely deliver only around 50 per cent emissions reduction by 2035 — well short of the legislated 75 per cent, a claim from an advocacy-aligned secondary source this article did not find the government had rebutted with its own published emissions modelling. A state cannot indefinitely keep a climate law on the books while dismantling the mechanism built to hit it; voters deserve to know which one gives.
The ownership question compounds the uncertainty. Retaining full public ownership of the existing coal and hydro fleet is a real commitment. But dropping the 54 per cent minimum guarantee for new generation shifts future investment risk, and profit, onto private capital via the QIC Investor Gateway — just as the Audit Office reports falling sector profits and a loss at CS Energy. Stanwell alone paid the state a $335.9 million dividend in 2025, a 78 per cent payout ratio, even as sector profit nearly halved. Queenslanders can reasonably ask whether a stressed, dividend-extracting public fleet, running coal to its technical limits while new build-out opens to private capital, is a stronger foundation than the pathway it replaced.
None of this means the previous target was flawless. A 2030 target resting on a single $37 billion pumped hydro project reaching financial close on time was itself fragile, and the Audit Office's findings show the sector was under strain before the Amendment Act passed, not only after. The fair reading is that Queensland inherited an ambitious but under-delivered target and has replaced it with a more cautious but less accountable framework — trading a number the public could hold the government to for criteria the government interprets for itself.
The risk to the future
A grid running on discretion, not law
The practical risk is not that Queensland's coal stations run for a few more years — engineering caution about reliability is defensible, and the Job Security Guarantee for coal workers, people like Craig at Tarong, is a genuine protection worth crediting. The deeper risk is that the state now has no legislated benchmark for whether the transition is happening, only a Roadmap the government of the day can revise administratively and an emissions law with no statutory delivery mechanism attached. Investors price policy risk into every project; the Conservation Council's finding of a sharp fall in renewable financial close in the government's first year, for all its limits as a single-year advocacy snapshot, matches what capital typically does when a legislated target disappears mid-transition.
If coal capacity keeps tripping offline in a grid still carrying 60 per cent of its load on ageing plant, the next government, of either party, inherits a decision Queensland has now deferred twice: legislate a firm, costed replacement pathway, or keep governing the state's largest emissions source and its power stations by ministerial discretion alone. A climate target with no delivery mechanism, and a coal fleet with no exit date, does not resolve the argument between ambition and realism. It postpones it, at the cost of the certainty every side says the state needs.