Counting Ships: Australia’s Energy Tradeoffs Get Real

"Wind extinguishes a candle and energizes fire. Likewise with randomness, uncertainty, chaos: you want to use them, not hide from them."

- Nassim Nicholas Taleb

If you live in the U.S., Australia looks like the place that should have this figured out.

Huge solar resource. Good wind resource. Lots of land. Not exactly short on engineers.

And yet they are in a fuel crunch anyway.

Right now their federal government is out there counting ships. The public line is that 53 fuel ships are on the way with 3.7 billion liters onboard. That is about 977 million gallons. (ABC News)

The problem is that ship-count reassurance falls apart the second you do basic math. One freight executive in the same report points out Australia burns about 4.5 billion liters a month, which is about 1.19 billion gallons. So the shipment number is not even a month of fuel. (ABC News)

And it is not theoretical. The same report says hundreds of stations are already out of diesel or gasoline. (ABC News)

So politicians do what politicians do. They grab the lever they can pull fast.

Price.

They cut fuel excise. The cut is 26.3 cents per liter, which is roughly one dollar per gallon. (ABC News)

That feels like help. It also does not create a single extra gallon of diesel.

If supply is tight, making fuel cheaper is a good way to increase demand at exactly the wrong time. It is not complicated. You are encouraging consumption while you are already short.

This is where someone inevitably asks, “Why not just use more renewables?”

Australia is basically the best-case argument for wind and solar. If it cannot make the story clean, no one can.

But this is where the tradeoffs show up.

First tradeoff: wind and solar do not replace imported liquid fuels just because you want them to. A fuel crisis is not mainly an electricity crisis. It is a liquids crisis. Freight, mining, farming, construction logistics, aviation, and a lot of industrial activity are still tied to diesel and other fuels. When imports get shaky, you cannot “solar” your way out of that in real time. (ABC News)

Second tradeoff: even inside the electricity world, nameplate is not output.

Australia has strong wind conditions in plenty of places. That does not change what wind is. It is intermittent. The Australian grid operator’s own reporting shows established wind farms averaged about 37% available capacity factor in Q4 2025, and the best-performing region hit 49%. Under 50%. In a strong quarter. (AEMO)

So yes, you can build wind. But you are buying a resource that does not show up on demand, and it does not show up at full output most of the time. That means you still need the rest of the system behind it. Transmission upgrades. Storage. Dispatchable backup. Curtailment management. All the stuff nobody puts on the banner.

Third tradeoff: the trash.

Australia’s solar buildout is huge. Now the back end is arriving. A government inquiry heard expectations of around 90,000 metric tons of solar panel waste per year by 2030. That is about 99,000 U.S. tons. (ABC News)

To visualize that, picture roughly 10,000 full-size garbage trucks worth of panels every year.

Not once.

Every year.

That is the deal you signed when you decided “more panels” was a complete plan. There are no perfect solutions. There are only tradeoffs. Welcome to your tradeoff, Australia. A growing pile of solar waste and a wind fleet that does not hit 50% capacity factor even in a good quarter. (ABC News)

Now add the part that makes it all feel even dumber.

Australia is not a country sitting on nothing. Its conventional oil reserves are not giant, but it has major unconventional oil potential. Geoscience Australia documents significant unconventional resources, and the U.S. EIA assessment put Australia’s technically recoverable shale oil at 17.5 billion barrels, with much larger “oil in-place” estimates. (Geoscience Australia)

So when Australia ends up watching imported fuel ships like a lifeline, that is not geology.

That is policy, permitting, investment, and social license decisions stacked up over time.

One last point, because Americans get sold this line all the time.

Electrification is not a magic eraser. If your grid is still dominated by fossil fuels at the system level, electrification often just pushes the combustion upstream. Your “clean” car becomes a demand signal that gets met somewhere by burning something. The fuel did not vanish. It moved.

So that is the real Australia lesson.

Even with world-class sun and strong wind, you can still end up vulnerable if you depend on imported fuel and you pretend intermittent electricity is a substitute for firm supply.

When things get tight, you either have resilient supply chains and controllable domestic capacity.

Or you start counting ships. (ABC News)