OSMAN:

From Schwartz Media, I’m Osman Faruqi, this is 7am.

For the past five years Dr Alan Finkel has been Australia’s Chief Scientist, which means he’s been on the front line of Australia’s climate wars. This year he was appointed special advisor to the federal government on low emissions technology.

In the latest Quarterly Essay, Getting to Zero, Dr Finkel outlines how Australia can harness new technology to rapidly transition to a low-emissions future. But some of Australia’s leading climate scientists have expressed concern about elements of Dr Finkel’s plan, questioning whether it’s ambitious enough.

Today, Alan Finkel on his plan for our energy future, and whether the Australian government should be moving faster.

OSMAN:

Alan, in your ideal world, what does Australia's energy sector... what does that energy mix look like, say, by 2050?

ALAN:

In the fundamentals, it's a pretty straightforward answer that I've got for you. And it's electricity. I, for many many years, have been talking about what I call the electric planet. So the logic is: we've got a problem and the problem is greenhouse gas emissions. Three quarters of that problem comes from burning fossil fuels, oil, coal and gas, for our energy needs. We can't switch off our energy needs. It's absolutely fundamental to civilisation. I don't think we can in a substantial fraction diminish it.

So ultimately to replace all the fossil fuels that we use for all the energy activities across our society. We pretty much have to triple the amount of electricity that we currently use and it's all got to be clean electricity. If you think about our starting position globally, there are seven large scale sources of energy. Oil, coal and gas - we just said what we're going to get out of those, in some countries nuclear to make nuclear electricity. In some countries, they will be able to get all the electricity they need from hydroelectricity.

In Australia. That's not a realistic growth opportunity. We haven't built a large-scale hydroelectric dam for 50 years. So, if we get five or six per cent from the renewable hydroelectricity, we're going to get 95 percent or thereabouts from solar and wind. We're just not doing nuclear and there's nothing else. So we're going to be very dependent on two sources of energy, solar and wind, not only for that replacement of our existing electricity supply, but for the tripling that will enable us to remove fossil fuels from all of our economy.

OSMAN:

Mm, the kind of vision you’re outlining Alan, of a future powered predominately by renewable energy, does sound pretty compelling. I’m wondering what you think are the steps we need to take to get there?

ALAN:

There are many things that need to be done, but we're not starting off at zero base. Let me just quickly tell you where we're at and then sort of extrapolate into the future.

Despite what some of our listeners might think, Australia is actually doing quite well on this journey. We have some world bragging rights. So, Australia has the highest per capita installed solar capacity and the highest per capita solar generation. It's because of the renewable energy target. It's because of the states and territories investing. It’s because of private industry, for marketing reasons, through shareholder activism, deciding to purchase solar and wind and therefore attract investors to build into that.

We are currently at the point where 28 percent of our electricity last year, for the whole of the year, 28 percent came from renewables, of which the vast majority of solar and wind and a little bit was from hydro. We've got the highest percentage in the world of solar rooftops. So we've started a journey on investing in solar and wind, which is going quite well. It will need a lot more nurturing to get there and it also will need a lot of investment in storage, or something, to what is called ‘firm the supply’ as you know, solar, wind, a variable.

OSMAN:

Right, what do you mean by that - “firming the supply”? And what would it actually entail?

ALAN:

So it’s not as easy as what people think. A lot of people think, well, I've got a solar panel at home. I've got a battery in the basement. Problem solved. Why can't the government do it? Well, because the electrical system is much bigger and much more complex than your home. And you know what? When things aren't working well in your home, you're still connected to the grid and that's your backstop.

But the grid itself, the solar and wind generators need a backstop. Today, that backstop comes just from the massive quantity of electricity being produced by coal and natural gas in the grid and hydro. But as the coal-fired generators exit and the percentage of solar and wind variable electricity generation increases, it gets more and more difficult to tide over those times. But we have to, we have to backstop them.

Batteries are beginning to help and will help more and more. But even though they're undergoing an incredible reduction in price and increase in availability, if we were to go as hard and fast as we would possibly go with solar and wind, batteries wouldn't solve the problem. For the short term, natural gas is the (forgive the pun) natural gas is the natural solution to providing the backstop for solar and wind electricity until we get to some future time where we've got oodles and oodles of batteries to tide us over.

OSMAN:

Natural gas is often presented as a low emissions alternative. It's a fossil fuel, but it's presented as a lower emissions alternative to coal. And it's forming a significant part of the federal government's response both in terms of developing a low emissions pathway, but also the government's response in terms of developing their post pandemic kind of economic infrastructure plan. Just how much better for the environment is natural gas than coal? And is it good enough that it will actually avoid us hitting those runaway climate targets?

ALAN:

Ah, yes, when you generate a unit of electricity into the unit we're talking about in the grid is called a megawatt hour, just a big unit of electricity, natural gas generators on average in the electricity grid are about half the emissions of coal per megawatt hour, even if you include the so-called upstream emissions from the production and pipelining and processing. Because when people say that, oh my gosh, natural gas is much worse than you think because you've left out the upstream emissions. Don't forget, you have to look at that for the coal-fired generators as well. And they also have upstream emissions. So per megawatt hour, natural gas is twice as good or half as bad, whichever way you want to look at it.

So using natural gas for firming solar and wind and thereby enabling you to bring in more solar, more wind more quickly. Is actually a good thing, you know, of course, people worry about the long term. Well, first of all, it's a smallish amount, so I wouldn't worry too much for the long term. But also there are solutions to that. More and more batteries, eventually those natural gas generators won't be called upon. So overall, I'm pretty comfortable that we're not locking in and getting a bad residual problem by using natural gas for firming. And if it helps us to accelerate the introduction of solar and wind, so be it.

OSMAN:

We’ll be back in a moment.

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OSMAN:

Alan, you’re describing a situation where we would continue to use natural gas but to “firm” our reliance on renewable energy. But the current government, as well as the gas industry, are pretty intent on drilling and exporting vast quantities of gas to sell overseas. Would you prefer them to focus more specifically on just supplying gas for the needs you outlined?

ALAN:

Look, Osman, it's a very complex - the question sounds simple, but the answers are complex. I don't think there's any evidence. Certainly nothing I've seen and I've looked, that would indicate that if one country say Australia withheld its coal or natural gas exports, that that would make any difference to the total amount of coal, the natural gas burnt in the world. If we export less, Qatar will export more, Russia will export more, Saudi Arabia, just gas, and Saudi Arabia will export more oil and things like that. If we export less coal, other countries will export more. And I'm not going to get into the argument that ours is better than other countries and therefore it's better. I'm just saying that if you're taking a global perspective, I'm not sure that will make a difference. If you're doing it to send a signal, fine. But it's a huge economic cost and one has to look at a signal that doesn't change the global outcome versus the significant domestic economic cost. So it's not a call that I'm going to make.

OSMAN:

Right, but what kind of message does that send to the world, that Australia is saying “well we won’t burn gas, but we’ll sell it to you and you can do it”. Isn’t there a moral imperative for us to take a stronger stance on that?

ALAN:

I think that particular message would get lost in the rest of the world. There is a moral imperative for us to participate, not passively but actively in the multilateral fora that are increasingly dominating the opportunities and the discussions.

So there's the Biden administration, which has made it very clear that it's going to invest massively in the clean energy transition. But they also are putting pressure on countries around the world. There's the Glasgow COP 26 coming up at the end of the year. And the British are putting a lot of pressure on other countries to increase their ambition. And Australia has to be a member of that. One of the things that I'm doing now is I've been appointed by the government as a special adviser to the Australian government on low emissions technologies. And that's literally to help the government to identify low emissions technology opportunities that we can co-develop with other countries and industry and invest in, in order to speed up their their rate of cost decline

OSMAN:

Right, and you mentioned the Biden administration, as well as the UK, who are both putting considerable pressure on other countries to be more ambitious. We’ve already seen Australia criticised on the world stage for our current trajectory. So do you think more needs to be done?

ALAN:

More needs to be done and the current government recognises that. So last year, the government put out the first low emissions technology statement and they committed to putting out an updated statement every year. And if you think of the analogy, each of those statements is like a kilometre marker along the highway. So those statements year after year become the low emissions technology investment roadmap.

Now, the first statement last year identified priorities across the economy. So there are five big priorities. One of them is clean hydrogen. So, even though we already have a national hydrogen strategy, we've further embraced that into this. The second is storage, like battery storage for the electricity system. The third one was green metals, specifically zero emission steel and zero emissions aluminium. So the fourth is geo sequestration through carbon capture and storage or carbon capture and storage. And the fifth is biosequestration in particular through soil organic. So things are moving in the right direction. You know, are they moving fast enough? Faster is better. But they are moving.

OSMAN:

It does strike me as slightly odd that in that list of five, which includes a few things that, you know, despite people trying for a long time, including in Australia, haven't really demonstrated large scale viability. I'm thinking things like geo sequestration and includes those things, but it doesn't include explicitly renewable energy.

ALAN:

Well, it does. Well, not explicitly. But the only reason for the second one being storage is to bring on more and more renewable energy. So, I don't think that there is logic in the government making a priority on the solar and wind directly, but the one step removed investment in trying to support the reduction in price and ease of deployment of storage to support the solar wind is extremely logical because that is the limiting factor at the moment.

OSMAN:

It sounds like, Alan, that you're sort of outlining a vision, a roadmap, that, you know, the use of technology, the way you're sort of describing it sounds like we might not need to do anything that radical in terms of the way we live, the way that our economy and society works. Things can, you know, be fast forward a few decades down the track and things look pretty similar. We live pretty similar lives. But what's happening in the background, the technology that's operating and powering our phones and our lights, that's where the solution lies. Is that a fair summary?

ALAN:

That is a very fair summary. I don't think that the alternatives to changing our lifestyles, such as global population control or behavioural change so that we all ride bicycles instead of cars are likely. They've been talked about for decades. And yes, of course, there are bike lanes in the city now and things like that. But that doesn't make a substantial difference to the greenhouse gas emissions. So people have indicated that not by the pocketbook, they're not really willing to pay a lot more and they're not really willing to give up their chosen lifestyles. In fact, people expect to see every year or certainly cumulatively over a decade by decade improvements in their cost of living and their lifestyles. And with technology, we can deliver it.

So, I could summarise your question and my answer by saying that my expectation is that we can have our cake and eat it too.

OSMAN:

Alan, thank you so much for talking to me today.

ALAN:

Pleasure.

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OSMAN:

Also in the news today…

Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews says he’s recovering steadily from a serious back injury, and is now walking for about 18 minutes a day. Andrews suffered broken ribs and a fractured vertebra in his spine after slipping last month. He narrowly avoided permanent spinal damage and has taken six weeks off work.

And Covid-19 restrictions will be lifted in Northern NSW from tonight, after the state recorded no community transmission for another day. Restrictions were applied to the Byron, Ballina, Lismore and Tweed shires after a local man tested positive for Covid-19, but from midnight the region will be brought back in line with the rest of the state.

I’m Osman Faruqi, this is 7am. See ya tomorrow.