For a brief time this week, renewables supplied 50 percent of Australia's energy needs.  It's a first for Aussie renewable energy that the experts believe will become a regular event in the future.

Just before lunchtime on Wednesday, renewables provided 50.2 percent of the power to Queensland, New South Wales, Victoria, Tasmania, and South Australia.  Most of it, 23.7 percent, came from rooftop solar; that was followed by wind at 15.7 percent, large-scale solar with 8.8 percent, and hydro at 1.9 percent.

"It is a fantastic achievement to have more than half of the National Electricity Market powered by renewable energy, and it's worth celebrating.  A decade from now it will be completely normal as more renewable energy and storage projects are built to replace retiring coal-fired power stations," said Kane Thornton, chief executive of the Clean Energy Council.  "At the beginning of the decade South Australia's power system ran on more than 50 percent wind and solar for the first time, but today it happens all the time.

“Renewables and storage can do everything our old coal plants can do, just cheaper, cleaner and more reliably," he added.

The journal RenewEconomy first reported the milestone that was spotted by OpenNEM, an online tool that monitors the national power grid in real-time using data from the Australian Energy Market Operator.