NSW is falling behind the rest of Australia in transitioning towards renewable energy, with a failure to encourage rooftop solar, move away from coal and ramp up targets hindering efforts.
A new report by the Climate Council has the state well behind frontrunners South Australia and Tasmania when compared in key categories such as rooftop solar penetration and percentage of renewable electricity.
"New South Wales received the worst renewable report grade due to the lowest, and falling, percentage of renewable electricity, low large-scale renewable capacity per person, no renewable energy target and low levels of rooftop solar," the report, released on Wednesday, said.
"Despite the Baird government promising to make NSW Australia's answer to California, NSW has dropped to the lowest share of renewable energy among the states."
The state, as well as Queensland and Victoria, relies on fossil fuels for 90 per cent of its power supply, the report said, while NSW and Victoria were the only two states to have not increased the proportion of renewables in their electricity supply in the past two years.
Almost a quarter of the state's current energy generation comes from renewable sources, the state government says.
But that falls well behind SA, which increased its renewable electricity share from 26 per cent in 2013 to 40 per cent in 2014.
Shadow Energy Minister Adam Searle said renewable energy production would need to be "ramped up significantly" for the government to meet its own 20 per cent by 2020 target and the Baird government doesn't have a "roadmap" to transition away from non-renewable sources.
"We're going backwards. We're nowhere near the 20 per cent target", Mr Searle told AAP on Wednesday.
"Whatever they're doing is not working."
Mr Searle said the Baird government's decision to wind up the Solar Bonus Scheme at the end of the year was a disincentive for households to install solar panels.
The state government says the billions of dollars of renewable energy projects are in the pipeline and NSW is in sync with Commonwealth targets.
"NSW leads Australia in large-scale solar with three large-scale solar plants, including the Nyngan Solar Plant which is the largest in Australia," Energy Minister Anthony Roberts said in a statement.
He said more than 320,000 NSW households and small businesses were generating solar power.
The Climate Media Centre says the target would be boosted significantly and more than $1.5 million pumped back into regional communities if a further 11 wind farms already approved for NSW are built.
"A single wind farm project can regenerate an entire region by creating new jobs, providing a second source of income for farmers and setting up a community fund that residents can choose to spend on whatever their community needs most - whether it's an annual event, a sports team, school or health services," Australian Wind Alliance national co-ordinator Andrew Bray said.
