The Illawarra escarpment never strays far from the sea in Wollongong, an industrial port city directly south of Sydney. Save for the bulge of Lake Illawarra, rainforested cliffs threaded with rich, black metallurgical coal seams run beside a shimmering ocean dotted with cargo ships – and possibly wind turbines, if plans materialise.
Side by side, the city’s coal and steelmaking past – still key to the local economy today – butts up against visions of its clean-energy future. And squeezed in between is a community of innovators, problem-solvers and skilled workers trying to find their place.
As I chat to actor-cum-climate-campaigner Yael Stone on a baking-hot February day, a train rattles past, injecting itself into our conversation. It knocks along a railway built in the 1880s to carry coal to Port Kembla, once Wollongong’s industrial heartland and still New South Wales’ second-largest port for coal exports.
“We’ve got a really potent potential workforce here for renewables, and we can’t disregard [their] industrial knowledge,” says Yael, who created Hi Neighbour, a not-for-profit helping local workers upskill for jobs in the fast-expanding renewables sector. “We can’t forget these folks, this region, that have powered our country in traditional ways.”
It’s a familiar challenge for Australia – establishing new industries in communities built around coal – but one that’s proving more complicated in the Illawarra than in other transitioning regions.
In early 2023, the Illawarra, seen as a key site for offshore wind development, was declared NSW’s fifth renewable energy zone and one of three hydrogen technology hubs. But according to Dr Chantel Carr, a human geographer from the University of Wollongong’s (UOW) School of Social Sciences, the region risks being left out of the national conversation about Australia’s clean-energy transition because a different type of coal is mined here – one that’s used for making steel, not generating electricity.
And yet locals know the Illawarra holds huge potential. In fact, it could be the source of some of the most crucial solutions to climate change. A groundswell of community-led action has, for example, given rise to Electrify 2515 , a world-first pilot that’s testing what happens when 500 homes in one suburb go fully electric.
A trio of startups borne out of industry know-how and university research are also making strides. UOW spin-off company Hysata has developed a super-efficient device for making green hydrogen from water using renewable electricity. Wollongong-based Sicona Battery Technologies has produced battery materials that could give electric cars one-third more range. And the third startup, Green Gravity, is devising a system for storing renewable energy in disused mineshafts across the Illawarra escarpment.
Meanwhile, BlueScope Steel, the largest steel manufacturer in the country, has just launched a project to figure out how to produce iron for steelmaking without burning coal.
“All of that [has] happened within a 5-to-10km [radius] here in the Illawarra,” says Ty Christopher, an electrical engineer and director of UOW’s Energy Futures Network.
Ty was born and raised in the Illawarra’s northern suburbs. “As a region, we’re right at the core of innovation, right at the core of people taking action on climate change,” he says.
“We also have this tremendous grassroots campaign of people caring deeply about the beautiful environment in which they live, caring deeply about the future of our region, our country and our planet, and asking themselves, ‘What can I do about that?’”
On the other hand, community division around the planned offshore wind zone has seeded uncertainty. The federal government approved the zone in June 2024 – the fourth of six Australia-wide – but reduced its size by a third of what was originally proposed and moved it 10km further out to sea. Project developers have quietly dropped their plans, although they cite the region’s deep water and wind speeds as technical challenges.
In Ty’s view, it shows the energy transition now well underway in Australia – and around the world – is primarily a social transformation, not a technological one. “The reality is, all of the tech to get us to net zero is available now,” he says. “The challenge for us is: how do we engage with it as individuals, as communities, and as a nation to get us there in a way that’s inclusive, that brings everyone along on the journey?”
The Illawarra is tackling these questions and providing answers that could light the path forward for Australia.
A whole-of-community approach
Bringing the whole community along for the clean-energy transition is at the core of Hi Neighbour’s mission. “We have to imagine our future in a way that includes our past,” Yael says. “There’s this real pride [in the Illawarra] around an industry that has been deeply formative for our community. It runs very deep.”
Darryl Best speaks proudly of his career in coalmining, even though he regrets its impact on the environment. Moving from Lithgow to the Illawarra after his electrical apprenticeship as a young man, Darryl ran a crew at Dendrobium coalmine and later was appointed undermanager at Wongawilli colliery.
“I always tried to put myself in the workers’ shoes,” says the retiree and Hi Neighbour board member who advocates for renewables jobs in coal communities. “I’m working as hard as I can.”
Darryl knows firsthand what happens when coalmines shut abruptly with no transition plan for workers. When Wongawilli closed in 2014, he was the manager who had to tell more than 100 miners they were out of work. “People lost their sense of worth,” he says. “They lost their ability to be part of the community they live in.”
Another local coalmine closed in the Illawarra last year due to safety concerns. But coal workers, Darryl says, are adaptable, skilled at problem-solving, and incredibly safety-conscious because they work in hazardous environments with fast-moving machinery. With those skills and a bit of training, he says coal workers can slot into about half the jobs that make up the growing renewables workforce.
But Chantel – who began her career as an industrial electrician at the Port Kembla Steelworks and now studies the social and workforce dimensions of energy transitions – says that while some industrial skills can be easily transferred, shifting sectors isn’t always straightforward.
One coal sector worker lamented to her: “I’ve spent the last two years working towards my [engineering] degree, and unfortunately…as much as I would like to move out of the industry, this is where my experience is.”
Many coalminers, especially those nearing the end of lifelong careers, also feel attacked by accusations their industry is ruining the climate. “Everyone is saying their industry is rubbish and you’ve got to shut [the coalmines] down,” Darryl says. “So, of course they’re going to rally against this. [Coalmining] is tied up with who they are.”
However, younger workers are heralding a new generation looking to renewables. Take Josh Smede, a Hi Neighbour scholarship recipient and third-generation electrician whose grandfather worked in the coalmines, for example. He now gets 80 per cent of his work from solar and battery installations.
To keep pace with the demand for renewables, modelling suggests Australia’s electricity workforce needs to double in the next five years to meet the country’s 2030 target of 82 per cent renewables in our electricity grids.
So, Hi Neighbour is also supporting high-voltage industrial electricians such as Endeavour Energy apprentice Claire O’Shea, who maintains and upgrades substations, as well as engineers, environmental assessors and project managers who are in demand amid skills shortages. Claire’s TAFE class, she says, is full of people wanting to go into solar and wind: “It’s a very popular thing that people are wanting to do.”
Questioning the transition
The jobs boom promised by large-scale renewables projects isn’t necessarily translating into jobs on the ground in the Illawarra just yet, though. Darryl says the lack of real job opportunities – save for a handful of local startups employing fewer than 150 people – makes it hard to convince career-long coal workers to retrain. “We’ve just been forgotten down here,” Darryl says. “Coalminers will say to me, ‘Transition into what or where? There’s nothing here.’”
Chantel again points to the fact that a different type of coal is mined in the region. “The issue that we have here in the Illawarra is that we’re not really on the radar because we’re not part of the conversation around thermal coal,” she says.
Thermal coal is burnt to generate electricity, whereas the Illawarra escarpment’s metallurgical (coking) coal is used for steelmaking. In fact, for the 3.2 million tonnes of raw steel BlueScope (formerly BHP Steel) makes annually at its Port Kembla Steelworks, about 80 per cent of the metallurgical coal it requires comes from the Illawarra. Australia’s domestic demand for thermal coal is tapering off with the rise of renewables, but metallurgical coal exports are peaking. “[The Illawarra is] on an entirely different trajectory to the likes of the Hunter, Gippsland, Central Queensland,” Chantel says. “[Illawarra coal workers] have only known a rapidly expanding export sector for the last decade and a half. So this talk of energy transitions doesn’t match their experience at all, which is a real problem.”
That trajectory will shift. Demand for metallurgical coal exports will decline as global steelmakers decarbonise by shifting away from coal-fired blast furnaces and adopting low-emissions technologies instead. For now, however, renewables remain a hard sell to local coal workers.
Another factor is that the Illawarra’s economy has been forced to diversify amid industrial layoffs and rising unemployment. In 1966, one in four men in the region was employed in steel, and some 44 per cent of the region’s workforce was employed in mining or manufacturing. Today, manufacturing makes up just 7.4 per cent, and mining only 1.8 per cent. Healthcare and education are now the largest employers.
Since the 1960s, BlueScope’s Port Kembla Steelworks has been the largest in Australia. It still employs some 3500 people and is one of the Illawarra’s biggest emitters. Decarbonising the steelworks will require up to 15 times more electricity than it currently uses – equivalent to the daily usage of 900,000 households. That demand can’t be met by rooftop solar, and the region’s geography limits space for solar farms, so large industries such as steel need the scale and reliability of offshore wind.
“No one technology is going to solve our clean-energy future,” Ty says. “But the right combination of most, if not all of them, will get us the clean-energy future we need.”
His calculations show the 2.9-gigawatt offshore wind zone planned for the Illawarra could generate more than double the region’s future energy demand, with the surplus helping to decarbonise industry or make green hydrogen. Locals would also benefit from cleaner air. But opposition to offshore wind has been fierce. Illawarra’s offshore wind zone drew 14,211 submissions – 5,305 more than the other five zones combined. About 65 per cent of submissions opposed the zone, though other local and national surveys indicate support is higher than submissions suggest.
The extent of community opposition was striking. “[It] came as a surprise to a lot of people,” says Natasha Larkin, a legal geographer whose PhD thesis at UOW examined the legal frameworks for offshore wind in Australia. After poring over submissions and attending fiery public meetings, Natasha traced the opposition back to several overlooked regional factors. “People didn’t buy the narrative that this would be good for jobs,” she says. Supporters and opposers alike expressed concern that environmental assessments are deferred until after a zone is declared and placed in the hands of project developers. “If developers are just looking at their individual project,” she continues, “then we’re not looking at the cumulative impacts across an area.”
Chantel points out that the Illawarra also has more technicians and trades workers than the national average – residents with a deep understanding of what the new industry might entail, and who are scrutinising proposals closely. “They were looking to the specifics of what’s being proposed and wanting more information,” she says, adding that there’s also a wariness of large industrial players who haven’t always done right by people or the environment. “That history [of industrial relations] can drive scepticism.”
Although the Illawarra’s offshore wind future hangs in the balance, Natasha views the process so far as constructive. “It brought out a lot of important issues that needed to be aired,” she says. “The questions people were asking as a community showed a great deal of insight and knowledge, and a deep connection to this place that ought not be dismissed.”
Decarbonising steel
While debates about offshore wind roll on, BlueScope is figuring out other ways to decarbonise its steelmaking processes. Its carbon footprint per tonne of steel produced is down 12 per cent since 2018, helped largely by reductions at its steelmaking plant in Ohio, USA, which uses abundant scrap steel to lower emissions. Port Kembla, with its coking coal and traditional blast furnaces, is a different pot of steel.
Driving through the steelworks on a public tour, we pass two hot metal ladles parked up on the rail line. The heat shimmers off the molten iron contained inside these torpedo-shaped carts. Behind, the No. 5 blast furnace continues to burn super-heated coking coal to smelt iron ore and extract the molten iron, which is carted off and made into steel. It’s this molten iron that BlueScope needs to make ‘green’ if the company is going to decarbonise its steelmaking.
That’s where a newly launched pilot project comes in. Called NeoSmelt, the pilot is testing whether BlueScope can do away with coal and traditional blast furnaces, and instead make molten iron using hydrogen and an electric smelting furnace. BlueScope plans to use green hydrogen (made using renewable electricity) to convert iron ore into molten iron.
But until the economics tip in green hydrogen’s favour, the company will use natural gas, a fossil fuel that contains hydrogen locked up in methane. “This is a fairly substantial pilot,” BlueScope’s Chief Executive of Australian Steel Products, Tania Archibald, said in January when announcing the NeoSmelt plant would be located in Kwinana, Western Australia, closer to the Pilbara iron ores BlueScope plans to use.
The plant, once operational in 2028, could produce 30,000–40,000 tonnes of molten iron per year. But that’s less than 1 per cent of BlueScope’s annual iron supplies. The company uses as much molten iron as the NeoSmelt plant could produce in a year in just 4–5 days at its Port Kembla Steelworks.
However, about 70 per cent of the world’s steel is made using iron from blast furnaces, so eliminating those coal-fired processes with NeoSmelt technology could slash steelmaking emissions not just in the Illawarra but also around the world. “What we’re hoping,” Archibald said at the announcement, “is that we can then effectively skip a step and go straight [from the pilot stage] to full commercial scale so it really helps accelerate the decarbonisation of steelmaking.”
The pilot will run for 3–5 years. But first, BlueScope – in partnership with its collaborators, mining giants Rio Tinto, BHP and Woodside Energy – needs to build the NeoSmelt plant from scratch. And the processes for making so-called green iron from Pilbara iron ores using renewable electricity are yet to be developed. “The challenge is going from creating a bucket of the stuff in the lab to creating multi-hundred-tonne ladles of it in a factory,” Ty says.
Until then, BlueScope is stuck with traditional ways of making iron at its Port Kembla Steelworks and is spending $1.15 billion to replace the worn-out inner brick lining of its No. 6 blast furnace so that it can operate for another 20 years.
In the meantime, BlueScope is trialling alternative methods to cut emissions, including using more scrap and exploring new carbon sources and hydrogen technologies. It has also trialled a CSIRO electrolyser that uses industrial waste heat to make green hydrogen with less power. But BlueScope’s decarbonisation plans all depend on having a stable supply of renewable electricity.
Novel answers
The next stop on the steelworks tour is an old warehouse BlueScope has leased to local startup Green Gravity. As we pile off the bus, we hear something whirring; inside the old foundry, the startup has built a 12m-high prototype of its gravity-based energy storage system. It works by hoisting weights using excess renewable energy from the grid and lowers them to dispatch power on demand, using regenerative braking, as in an electric car, to convert the weights’ motion into electricity.
The idea is to build much bigger versions of this prototype in abandoned mineshafts that plunge several hundred metres deep into the Illawarra escarpment. “Any mine that’s no longer in use, we can turn into energy storage,” says Tania Jones, sustainable market development manager at Green Gravity. “The more systems we have, the more power we can generate.”
Made of shiny new steel, the Green Gravity structure gleams against the red-tinged frame of the old foundry. The technology, if deployed, would help the grid handle more renewables, functioning like a battery but with virtually endless ‘charge-discharge’ cycles. By Green Gravity’s calculations, installing the system in just one local mineshaft could power about 3000 homes – one suburb in the Illawarra – through the night by storing surplus solar energy from their rooftops.
With 37 old mineshafts mapped out across the Illawarra, the potential capacity is huge. These sites are already grid-connected, the land is already disturbed and needs rehabilitating, and the local workforce has the skills that Green Gravity needs to plan, design, build, wire up, monitor and maintain their systems.
“Once the system is up and running, we’ll also need a lot of data analysts and mechatronics specialists,” Tania says. “Electricity is real-time. Understanding what the grid’s requirements are, the demand and the supply, when to switch [the system] on and off – there’s a lot of data collection, simulation and computer programming associated with this. And that opens up whole new career pathways for the community that perhaps didn’t exist before.”
Green Gravity has, however, taken heed of the community division around offshore wind in the Illawarra. The startup – which Tania says is on track to build its first demonstration plant in a local mineshaft by the end of 2025 – is taking a more considered approach, inviting people to tour their warehouse to size up the prototype technology for themselves.
“What I’m seeing is that for us to make this energy transition, it needs to be very grassroots and community-driven,” says Tania, whose grandparents emigrated from Malta in the mid-1940s and were employed in the steelworks. For Green Gravity, that means building operations using the skills and experience of Wollongong locals – and getting the community onside. “You need to meet the community where they’re at and understand what’s important to them,” she says.
The solar challenge
One-third of Australian homes now have solar panels, which means some 4 million houses are feeding excess electricity into the grid (if they don’t have their own battery for storage). Collectively, solar-powered households generate more electricity for our national grid than large solar farms, wind or gas.
“Australians are leading the world in energy transformation,” Ty says. But that also means we’re navigating uncharted territory. “We don’t have somewhere else to look to say, ‘They’re ahead of us on this journey; there’s a proven pathway forward.’”
That’s why Electrify 2515, a community-led project in northern Illawarra masterminded by local engineer and innovator Dr Saul Griffith, is so exciting. “It’s a way to jump 10 years into the future and prove how to do this – not in a lab, not in a spreadsheet, but in real life,” Ty says.
The pilot project was launched late last year, backed by $5.4 million in federal funding to help 500 households in the 2515 postcode – which includes the Illawarra suburbs of Austinmer, Clifton, Coledale, Scarborough, Thirroul and Wombarra – to buy home batteries and switch from gas to all-electric appliances. The subsidies will be scaled for income, and the pilot will also measure economic benefits to the community if household savings on energy bills flow into local businesses.
More than 600 people packed Anita’s Theatre in Thirroul on a sunny Sunday afternoon in November for the pilot launch, and Saul confessed to his neighbours he was nervous. “I’m used to running experiments on the machines,” he told the crowd. “This is an experiment I’m running on my community.”
But the community is game. More than 250 households applied to be part of the pilot in its first month. On top of financial support to electrify their homes, participants will also receive a smart energy device to track and optimise their household energy use. Project partner Endeavour Energy will monitor electrical loads across the suburb, and Saul hopes the data will show electrifying most homes isn’t going to break the grid but make it more reliable.
It’s early days, but Saul – an architect of the largest piece of climate legislation in US history, the US Inflation Reduction Act – lights up when I ask him about the Electrify 2515 launch a few months after the event. “[It felt] a bit historic,” he says. “Climate action has [until recently] either been large-scale public protest or very wonky policy stuff like carbon tax debates.”
Electrify 2515, he says, is different because it’s community-led. “[We are] engaging in genuine on-the-ground climate action and figuring out how to do it together. It isn’t really happening anywhere else in the world quite like that.”
As momentum builds around the project, federal Minister for Climate Change and Energy, Chris Bowen, has directed the Australian Renewable Energy Agency to consider funding other community electrification pilots nationwide.
In years to come, Saul hopes we might look back and see Electrify 2515 as “the first bolthole where we proved that the future could work”. Already, as a country, we’ve crossed the electrification tipping point, according to Saul’s latest analysis with Rewiring Australia, a non-profit organisation he co-founded.
Going electric is now the cheapest way to do everything: to heat your house, to heat your hot water, to drive, and to buy electricity. Even including upfront purchasing costs, fully electric households with solar and batteries could save about $4100 per year, the modelling shows. “Economically, this is a no-brainer,” Saul says.
But even more meaningful than those numbers are the one-on-one conversations around 2515 that Saul has when he swims with septuagenarians in rock pools and is peppered with questions about hot-water systems and electric vehicles (EVs) at his local coffee shop. Those conversations build trust, which Saul says is the key ingredient needed for the energy transition. It’s how solar panels were sold so successfully in Australia. “Over the back fence,” Saul says. Neighbour to neighbour.
“I was swimming the other day,” Saul adds, “and an old guy stops me.” He was a retiree, a former fitter and turner at Port Kembla, who admitted he didn’t initially believe Saul’s assertion that it was cheaper to heat his home with solar. But the retiree had done a spreadsheet, and now declared to Saul: “It’s true: I’m gonna save $1600 this year. So I’ve decided to do the whole house now. It’s going to be all-electric. The wife loves it.”
“Here is this rust-coated-on-him, heavy-industry guy,” Saul says. “He tells his mates…” Saul trails off, pausing to take it all in. “I mean, that feels like a very positive social change you can believe in.”