High energy costs drive surge in demand for EVs, solar panels: NAB

All of Australia’s big four banks are chasing increased exposure to sustainable finance, as they also face pressure to cut their lending to the country’s largest carbon emitters, which mainly occurs through the banks’ institutional businesses. Even so, analysts from Macquarie last week said the big four were less exposed to fossil fuel businesses than major banks in the United States and Canada.

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The Macquarie analysts said the big four banks’ sustainable finance commitments had hit $315 billion, and NAB’s targets for cutting emissions from its lending for oil, gas and cement manufacturing were the most ambitious of the big four. Westpac had the most ambitious target in the power generation sector, the analysts said.

Business banking is a key battleground for Australian lenders, and Irvine said NAB was still seeing “pretty good underlying strength” in the economy, including sings of supply chain pressures easing.

“Shipping costs have come down – the costs of a shipping container is down meaningfully. We’re seeing more product into Australia,” he said.

NAB’s rivals are also eyeing the potential boom in loans for EVs – a market that has been relatively slow to take off in Australia, but has been growing quickly lately. Motoring industry statistics on Monday showed the Tesla Model Y was the 10th most popular vehicle sold here in November, and Toyota’s Hi-Lux was the most popular.

The Federal Chamber of Automotive Industries said there were 13,415 zero and low-emissions vehicles sold in November. About 60 per cent of these were hybrid vehicles, a third were battery-powered, and a small share were plug-in hybrids.

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