NOT for the first time, the CSIRO Energy Centre at Steel River, Mayfield, is in the firing line for job cuts, with management confirming a restructure likely to cut 42 to 46 positions - and add 10 to 12 more - at an energy business unit that also includes operations in Melbourne and Perth.
The nation's premier research organisation has provided only basic information on the changes, describing them as a response to "a rapidly changing environment" on which staff had been consulted.
But at a time when research and development on renewable energy of all sorts has surely never been more important, it is difficult - on the paucity of information the CSIRO is making available to the public - to understand how job cuts of any number can be justified.
Regardless of the political debate over fossil fuels and climate change, renewables will eventually win the day, once the present shortcomings in the storage of energy can be overcome.
That the Tomago Aluminium smelter would flatten Tesla's "world's biggest battery" in South Australia in eight minutes shows how far storage technology has to go to make renewable power a truly 24/7 proposition.
This is not to denigrate renewables but to highlight the importance of the Mayfield research centre and others like it, whether they are government- or privately funded or, like the CSIRO, a mixture of the two.
Research and development is an expensive business, but it is critically important at all levels, from the purely theoretical to the fully commercialised.
And this is especially the case in a world where recent uncertainties have convinced many that the West must lift its game if it is to reduce its reliance on Chinese technologies.
One of these areas is hydrogen, the subject of an 88-page CSIRO paper on Australia's "priorities and opportunities", published in December.
Often referred to as "the next big thing" in post-fossil fuel energy, hydrogen has proven devilishly difficult to commercialise, as shown by the almost 200 years of effort to develop "fuel cells" that split water molecules into their constituent parts of hydrogen and oxygen.
Add these concerns to a global push towards "net zero" carbon dioxide emissions, and it should be clear that Australia needs more energy research, not less.
If the Coalition can "follow the science" with coronavirus, it can do it with climate change.
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