Spinifex is an opinion column. If you would like to contribute, contact us to ask for a detailed brief.
The first two parts of this series made a clear case: Australia will not solve housing, transport, affordability and emissions by continuing to spread our cities ever further outward. Density matters. Infrastructure matters.
But there is a third layer that now matters just as much: precincts
Why precincts?
Precincts are where density and infrastructure become real. They are the scale at which housing, mobility, energy, employment and services can be planned together instead of as disconnected systems.
They are also the scale at which electrification stops being an abstract national target and starts reshaping what a suburb, a regional centre or a country town can actually do. They are where the new economy is emerging.
This matters because electrification is not simply a cleaner substitute for fossil fuels. It changes the economics of place. A precinct with abundant local electricity, storage, smart controls and high-capacity charging can attract activity that would previously have been too costly, too risky or simply impossible.
In the old energy system, towns and suburbs were designed around fuel delivery and centralised supply. In the new system, they can be designed around abundant renewable electricity and the productive uses it enables.
The current oil shock reinforces that point. Australia still tends to talk about energy security as though it means tanks full of fuel waiting for a geopolitical emergency. But batteries, electrified transport and renewable generation increasingly offer a more active form of resilience: one that works every day, cuts exposure to volatile oil markets and strengthens local capability instead of deepening dependence on imported fuels.
Where do precincts work?
The logic for precincts does not stop at the edge of the grid or city boundary. It should now shape how towns, corridors and city-regions are planned. The key question is no longer just how much power a place needs for households and shops. The question is how much power a place may need once it becomes an electrified freight stop, a logistics node, a processing hub, a dense mixed-use urban precinct, or a flexible production centre.
Take a small regional town in Western Australia. Historically it needs only a few megawatts across a normal day to supply homes, local businesses, schools, health services and modest industry.
But if it sits on a strategic freight corridor and becomes the natural charging point for 100s of electric trucks a day, demand can change by an order of magnitude. That is not a small adjustment to the old model. It is a new economic identity.
Most precinct planning still treats energy as background infrastructure rather than one of the central variables shaping urban performance, affordability and resilience.
Once that amount of energy is available, the town is no longer just a place people pass through. It becomes a new kind of precinct. Cheap, reliable, locally generated electricity can support cold storage, local food processing, controlled-environment agriculture, water treatment, mineral processing, new manufacturing, and digital services.
Expensive energy stops being an input cost and instead cheap energy becomes a regional development asset and engine.
This is the real precinct opportunity. Electrification does not just decarbonise existing demand; it expands what a place can become. The next generation of precincts will be defined as much by grid capacity, storage, charging capability and digital orchestration as by roads, pipes and zoning.
How does a new precinct work?
Governments are increasingly talking about priority precincts around major transport investments, especially where housing and jobs can be concentrated near rail and other transit.
That language is useful, but most precinct planning still treats energy as background infrastructure rather than one of the central variables shaping urban performance, affordability and resilience.
Instead of treating rising electricity demand as a problem to be reluctantly accommodated, precincts can be designed to turn energy abundance into competitive advantage.
This is a natural evolution of the long-standing framing of cities as living systems with flows of energy, materials and people. In this creature, precincts become the metabolic organs where high-flow clean energy enables new functions, not just supplies existing ones.
A serious precinct strategy in the 2020s should ask at least five questions:
- How much electricity will be required when buildings are fully electrified, not merely connected?
- What happens to local demand when EV charging, electric bus depots, urban freight and logistics are added?
- Can rooftop solar, community batteries, larger batteries and smart demand management reduce network costs and improve resilience for the whole of place?
- Which local industries and services become viable once abundant clean power is available?
- How can precinct loads be designed to be flexible, so that energy-intensive activity follows the availability of low-cost renewable supply?
Those questions lead to a different model of development. Instead of treating rising electricity demand as a problem to be reluctantly accommodated, precincts can be designed to turn energy abundance into competitive advantage.
That means planning substations, feeders, charging hubs, storage, thermal efficiency and digital control systems from the start, instead of trying to retrofit them after growth arrives. And most of all they are going to be based on renewable energy as this is now far and away the cheapest way to build and power a precinct.
Value capture
Urban development needs to find sites where private investment can see that land values will increase due to the infrastructure being built. This has mostly been applied before to new train lines and sometimes new freeways. What this new precinct model means is that land values are being potentially increased in a new way as this combination of infrastructure is ideally suited to that size of land parcel, and hence can attract private investment to enable affordable, dense housing to be applied. It can be seen as a new kind of TOD (transit oriented development), except it includes renewables energy – a ROD (renewable oriented development). These are being researched at Curtin.
Perhaps a series of RODs could the basis of the new urban development economy. If a tram boulevard was built as the transport link down a main road, it would add to the ROD with a standard TOD. Together this would enable urban regeneration to be transformative with a completely new model that achieves multiple outcomes now on the urban agenda.
What about country towns?
In regional Australia, this same ROD idea could be transformative. A town with strong renewable resources, good land availability and adequate network access may be able to combine truck charging with hydrogen production, ammonia or fertiliser manufacture, cold-chain logistics, or other interruptible industrial loads. On busy freight days the electrons power vehicles. On quieter days they can flow into products.
The point is not that every town should pursue the same industrial model; the point is that energy-rich precincts have strategic options the fossil economy has never offered. Cheap electrons and storage weaken the “tyranny of distance” for regional towns; truck charging plus local industry turns a dot on the map into a node.
Recent commentary strengthens this case. Policy discussion is moving well beyond central generation alone. Behind-the-meter batteries and virtual power plant models are moving from the fringe into mainstream conversation, helping show how precincts can coordinate local supply, storage and demand rather than relying solely on top-down expansion.
At the same time, mainstream policy bodies are increasingly linking housing, net zero and infrastructure, while still underplaying building and precinct electrification as a core infrastructure class. The ROD can be the focus that unblocks the potential for transformative urban and regional development.
That is the next frontier for Australian planning. The question is not only how to fit more people into better places. It is how to build precincts and regional towns that can do more because they have more energy than the fossil era ever allowed.