Supporting Australia’s Renewable Energy Zones

Extract from Energy New Bulletin article – Analysis: Inside Australia’s REZ pipeline 30 September 2025

Over the past three years, the phrase ‘renewable energy zone’ has increasingly crept into policy papers, press releases and political talking points. Federal and state governments alike have spruiked their creation as a central plank of Australia’s transition strategy.  

The idea is simple enough – cluster new generation, transmission and industry in designated hubs where wind, solar, hydro and storage resources overlap. The hope is this not only accelerates decarbonisation but also cuts costs and minimises disruption to the grid. 

Renewable energy zones – let’s call them REZs – are the on-shore cousins of the Commonwealth’s offshore wind “declared areas.” They identify where strong wind and solar resources overlap with grid capacity, then funnel new generation and storage into those corridors in a coordinated way. 

How the model works

Think of it like a funnel:

1. Government defines a REZ boundary and modelled hosting capacity
2. A transmission project and operator are progressed
3. Developers bid for “access rights” to connect
4. Winning projects still need normal state and federal planning or environmental approvals
5. Steel only goes in the ground when access rights, planning consent and transmission delivery line up.

So, where does Mipela fit in?

We have often referred to the lifecycle of a project or an asset, as shown in the following diagram. Along the way, there are several activities that take place that require engagement with stakeholders and landholders. These needs change as each project matures but the core data remains consistent.

Mipela specialises in providing software solutions to best manage these processes including it’s commercial off the shelf software called X-Info Stakeholder Management. X-Info Stakeholder Management is designed to get a new project up and running for stakeholder data collection, management and reporting perspective.

We appreciate that every project is slightly different but they all start from the same fundamentals relating to stakeholder data of Add, Search and Report. X-Info Stakeholder Management can then be updated to best align to each project’s business processes and workflows.

X-Info Stakeholder Management is currently being utilised by several REZ projects, right across the country, to support newly stood up project teams who need to hit the ground running.

Written by Karen Thompson