One of Australia’s largest energy providers, AGL Energy, has rejected a second bid from tech billionaire Mike Cannon-Brookes to buy out the firm and speed up decarbonisation efforts.
“Our path was the world’s biggest decarbonisation project. From Aus,” he wrote. “The board are proceeding with their demerger path. This path is a terrible outcome for shareholders, taxpayers, customers, Australia, and the planet we all share.”
AGL Energy Chair Peter Botten said the bid was still undervalued.
Botten said AGL’s proposed demerger into two entities, a “green” energy retailer called AGL Australia, and a coal-fired group called Accel Energy, would be a “catalyst” for the business.
“It will create two industry leading companies with distinct value propositions. It will allow each business to be valued separately and more positively by the market on the basis of their own specific business fundamentals.”
AGL has set net-zero emission targets for both retailers,
David Ritter, CEO of Greenpeace Australia Pacific responded to the announcement by accusing AGL of an “ideological obsession with coal.”
“AGL has consistently failed to read the market, the pace of the energy transition, and the extent of its environmental damage,” he said in a statement.
Yet, critics of the Cannon-Brookes-led bid of AGL point to the unsustainability of the renewable sector in terms of reliability and as a business.
Steve Baxter, tech investor and star of Australia’s Shark Tank television series, said Australia’s green energy sector was still heavily subsidised by the government.
“I have no problem with it unless on their path to this clean energy utopia they need the government to tilt the field in their favour,” he told The Epoch Times in an email.
“This could be more or continued energy subsidies for green energy, requirements for transmission investments that favour unreliable energy projects over others, and in general anything that requires the government to favour any interference in the energy market.”
The invasion of Ukraine has also put the issue of energy security under the spotlight, with several European nations initially hamstrung in their ability to respond to the deployment of Russian forces because they were highly reliant on the country’s coal and gas reserves.
“One of the big reasons that Putin has gambled on this is because he thought that the energy dependence of Western Europe, particularly Germany, meant they wouldn’t oppose him,” Campbell Newman, former Queensland premier and now-Senate candidate told The Epoch Times. “He thought he had them on the energy issue, and he does have them on the energy issue.”
Tesla founder Elon Musk even conceded that Europe needed to abandon its net-zero ambitions—which saw countries like Germany simply export emissions-heavy industries to Russia—and restart its nuclear energy sector.
