Joint infrastructure and biodiversity optimisation reveals favourable cost-protection trade-offs in a carefully planned renewable energy transition.

A rapid transition to renewable energy is essential for climate change mitigation, yet poorly planned developments risk contributing to the biodiversity extinction crisis and losing social licence through impacts on sensitive species. We provide the first quantitative analysis that demonstrates how renewable energy can be strategically deployed to effectively erase biodiversity impacts while meeting energy needs cost-effectively. Focusing on Queensland, Australia - a global biodiversity hotspot experiencing rapid renewable energy expansion - we quantify how increasing levels of biodiversity protection only modestly increases costs of renewable energy infrastructure projects required to meet electricity demand in a net-zero emission energy system in 2050. To identify areas most important for threatened species in Queensland, we ran a spatial prioritisation of the spatial distribution of threatened species and ecosystems across the state to create a map of priority biodiversity areas. We then used this map to exclude renewable energy infrastructure development in five scenarios: business as usual (BAU), the top 30%, the top 50%, the top 70%, and the top 90% of priority biodiversity areas. By avoiding 30% of the most important areas for threatened species when developing renewable energy infrastructure, we avoid 90% of species’ distributions, with 77% of species distributions completely avoided. Avoiding infrastructure in these areas adds just 1-2% to electricity bills in 2050 relative to our BAU scenario. Increasing protection to 50% of lands protects 96% of species distributions, adding just 2-4% to electricity bills in 2050. These cost increases are likely much smaller than the uncertainty of the planning task, rendering them effectively unobservable. We show how other Australian states also have high land use flexibility relative to energy demand, indicating the generality of our results in Australia and the global transferability of our method and analysis. Our approach reveals opportunities for biodiversity protection within energy transition planning and challenges the perception that global renewable energy and biodiversity protection targets are irreconcilable.