CEDA Summit heralds Australia's opportunity to accelerate energy transition

Australia’s energy sector faces a great opportunity to take a bigger leap forward and make bolder, more ambitious efforts to advance and secure a decarbonised future.

At CEDA’s recent Climate and Energy Summit 2025, WSP in Australia joined policy makers, institutions, and senior industry experts and executives to help address the energy transition, climate challenges, policy gaps, and explore diverse solutions towards achieving a low-carbon world.

During the event, WSP’s Director of Power & Energy, Felicity Galluzzo, facilitated a plenary discussion around funding Australia’s transition, while Maritime Executive, Simon Blake, joined the session ‘Advancing Australia’s Wind Energy Future’ as a panellist.

Read on to learn their key takeaways:

Advancing Australia’s investment in clean energy and future networks

Challenges associated with Australia’s energy transition, and delays in developing and delivering transmission and renewables projects, are often hotly debated in the public sphere. From the outside looking in, it may appear little progress is being made. However, the journey to a clean energy future is well underway, and the pace is anticipated to accelerate.

Plans to responsibly transform the grid to support our changing energy mix can also be executed with renewed confidence. Strong and consistent policy direction, along with clear investment signals and a willingness to back critical infrastructure, will be important in securing Australia’s local energy future and positioning the country as a world leader in clean energy.

“Australia is going through two transitions. We have our domestic transition from coal to renewables, and our role in the global imperative to decarbonise. This is the superpower transformation that can create huge opportunities for Australia in global markets, but we are not the only players; if we don’t act with urgency we may be left behind and locked out of new markets in which we should have a natural advantage,” Felicity added. “There is no doubt, this is a race, and we need to take action to lock in a podium finish.”

Offshore wind energy’s role in improving energy security

While still relatively new to the Australian renewable energy sector, the offshore wind industry has been acknowledged as a significant contributor in decarbonising Australia’s economy. Compared to land-based turbines, offshore wind farms generate more energy in a day because of stronger and more consistent winds, as well as more potential for turbines to be physically larger.

Globally, the International Energy Agency’s Net Zero by 2050 Roadmap calls on the sector to rapidly scale up to 80GW of new installed capacity per year from 5GW today.

Ports play a vital role in the entire lifecycle of offshore wind farms–from construction and assembly, logistics, transportation, to operational support and maintenance.

“Ports are a critical part of enabling infrastructure investment for development. Most of the components to build offshore wind turbines are manufactured overseas, so the ports where these components arrive at needs to be quite specialised,” he said.

To maximise the potential of offshore wind farms and ensure efficiencies, port capacities need to grow, and it will be crucial to innovate using new technologies by drawing on our local and extensive experience working on offshore wind and ports projects to meet these requirements. Significant investment in people, port infrastructure, and supply chains are required to succeed in rapidly expanding the sector.

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