Zero Carbon Australia 2020 Stationary Energy Plan - parliamentary launch, 22 June 2010

The 16 page Synopsis of the plan is available here. The full plan will be released on 14 July at the Melbourne Energy Institute, and available for download in the morning of the 14th. For information on the Melbourne event click here.

Zero Carbon Australia Stationary Energy Plan Parliamentary Launch from beyondzeroemissions on Vimeo.

Full transcript below:

Matthew Wright: OK. Thank you everyone for coming. My name’s Matthew Wright. I’m the executive director of Beyond Zero Emissions. Today we’re proud to be launching our Zero Carbon Australia Stationary Energy Plan with the University of Melbourne Energy Institute. And we’re especially pleased to have in attendance Senator Christine Milne, Senator Judith Troeth and Senator Nick Xenophon. Now, we’re also – there’s a clash with the Labor caucus meeting, so we’re hoping that someone from the Labor Party will be able to attend also.

First up, we’ll have Senator Christine Milne, but before then also look forward to Mike Sandiford who’s from the University of Melbourne. He’s a Professor of Geology and he’ll be speaking about what the Melbourne Energy Institute’s been doing in regards to planning our sustainable energy future. So without much ado – and one more thing, sorry, you’ll hear from me at the end about the plan. So over to Senator Christine Milne, thank you.

[Applause]

Senator Christine Milne: Thank you Matthew, and I just wanted to say congratulations to Beyond Zero Emissions and to Melbourne University for getting together to provide us with a road map to 100 per cent renewable energy future in Australia. Not just any time in the future, but in a decade. This is a very exciting report. It has academic rigour. It has also the hope of a generation, and it has thousands of jobs waiting to happen associated with it.

The dream of 100 per cent renewable energy future was seen as just that for quite a long time: a dream. And especially here in the Parliament where people kept talking about, yes it’s a dream but you have to have baseload power. All that is now gone. The technology exists now to go to 100 per cent renewables. The technology with solar thermal, with storage, with molten salt is there. We can do this, but we can only do it if we garner the political support to do it in this country – to make it happen. And that means getting beyond coal. And I particularly welcome here today Senator Nick Xenophon and Senator Judith Troeth who are with us because it is going to be by building coalitions of support for 100 per cent renewable energy future in the Parliament that will see it delivered. And it also means we need that equal political commitment to phasing out fossil fuel subsidies, to giving support to things like the renewable energy target. There are so many exciting things that we can be doing - but congratulations, it’s a fantastic report. Thank you for bringing it to the Parliament and I look forward to welcoming it and working with my parliamentary colleagues to see this happen: 100 per cent renewables in a decade. Thank you.

[Applause]

Matthew Wright: I’d just like to ask Senator Troeth if she’d like to speak. Thank you.

Senator Judith Troeth: Good morning everyone, and I too am delighted to be here and to acknowledge my parliamentary colleagues, Senators Milne and Xenophon. This is a fitting week for this launch with legislation to amend the renewable energy target likely to finally get passed in the Senate. Now the ambitions of this report are commendable. And while I may not agree with all of the recommendations put forward in this report, it’s important that we continue to have a robust debate in the most effective and efficient ways to reduce carbon emissions. And it’s just as important that we match this talk with action.

Now my colleague Petro Georgiou mentioned in Parliament recently that progress is not inevitable, and I was reminded of this when reading former US President Jimmy Carter’s speech in July 1979 that pledged by the year 2000 America would generate 20 per cent of its electricity from the sun. And it’s clear that we’ve all been talking about this for quite some time.

But the United States is making progress, with the Obama administration’s policy goal matching legislation passed last year in the US House of Representatives to reduce emissions to 17 per cent on 2005 levels by 2020, and by 83 per cent by 2050. Now the UK, of course, is already part of the European Union Emissions Trading Scheme, and New Zealand has its own cap and trade scheme. We have some leg work ahead of us in order to catch up.

Just before the end of last year, Beyond Zero Emissions came to see me in my Melbourne electorate office, and I remain very impressed by the insight and commitment that they readily present. We need vigorous and energetic minds like this to meet many of our challenges, particularly on climate change. I’m a supporter of market based solutions, and I think we have to look for the least expensive, most practical way for Australia to make the emissions cuts needed to meet our international climate obligations. But we also need complementary measures to support such a significant mitigation vehicle.
One such measure is an effective renewable energy target that helps drive industry innovation without the government necessarily picking out technology winners. It’s very important that we are not left waiting for the rest of the world. If we do, we’ll end up behind the international eight ball on innovation and technology. Something that Australia has the potential to be the world leader on if we match it with a government that has the political will to do so. So congratulations for your hard work and collaborative efforts on this very important body of work.

[Applause]

Matthew Wright: And I’ll ask Senator Nick Xenophon to the podium.

Senator Nick Xenophon: Thank you, and it’s great to be here with Judith and Christine. Preparing for today’s launch, I took some time to reflect on the debate surrounding the CPRS and exactly what went wrong. Personally, I believe that dealing with climate change really is the greatest moral challenge of our time. And that said, I get the feeling that some in this building might be happy to say stuff like that, but unwilling to back it up with action. So what went wrong? What actually killed action on climate change with an effective ETS? And I think ultimately compromise killed the ETS. Having talked tough, the Government introduced a very unambitious target of just five per cent. It was never going to be enough to deal with the issue, even from a risk management point of view. But getting – by setting such a meaningless target, it made it easier for the Government to walk away from that target when the going got tough.

The Government compromised on the goal and made the goal easy to abandon. And that’s why I fully support the thinking behind the Zero Carbon Australia 2020 project. It’s not the five per cent cut project, or the twenty per cent cut project, with a bunch of unachievable caveats, it’s a zero carbon project. And I think people actually want to be told a narrative, a story which is ambitious, which is aspirational, but also practical. And I think that is what this project is about. It’s a plan for now, it’s practical; it’s a plan that’s achievable, requiring an estimated capital investment of between 3 to 3.5 per cent of GDP. Predictably, there will be a lot of commercial resistance to this type of plan, but I think it’s up to all of us to show the way forward: to show that climate change is a serious challenge. And I think what is inspirational about this project, this blueprint - and it’s actually a blue document – is that we can actually do things, we can actually be world leaders on this, even in the absence of an ETS.
And for those that say it’s not achievable, and I think Judith made mention to Petro Georgiou and progress, I’d like to finish off by referring to that old warhorse of British politics, Tony Benn, who once said: ‘it’s the same each time with progress. First they ignore you, then they say you’re mad, then dangerous, then there’s a pause, and then you can’t find anyone who disagrees with you’. And I think this is part of the process of not finding anyone who disagrees with us. This is part of that important stage. So thank you very much for inviting me to be part of this.

[Applause]

Matthew Wright: Thank you Nick, and it’s definitely a pleasure for Beyond Zero Emissions to have Senator Judith Troeth, Senator Nick Xenophon and Senator Christine Milne with us today. And up next we’ve got Mike Sandiford who’s Professor of Geology at the University of Melbourne. And just after him we’re also going to have actor Tom Long who’s going give his personal perspective on why this sort of challenge is something that really appeals to him and why he thinks the community should get behind that. So could we please have Professor Mike Sandiford to the lectern.

[Applause]

Professor Mike Sandiford: Thank you very much. And it’s a great pleasure for me to be here. I have the privilege of being the Director of the Melbourne Energy Institute, the new interdisciplinary institute at the University of Melbourne, which is tackling one of the big issues of our time, our energy systems. We have a particular focus on looking at sustainable energy systems. We bring together the work of over 200 researchers across the university, working on these issues in over seven faculties and a myriad of departments. And one of the great privileges of my job is to work with young people, young researchers and even students at the University of Melbourne who are fired up by the challenges our energy systems and our energy futures provide to them.

One of those is Patrick Hearps, the lead author of the Zero Carbon Australia Stationary Energy Plan. And for me, working with such young, brilliant and inspired people is just a great privilege.

The Zero Carbon Australia Stationary Energy Plan is in fact our second publication, and we’ve only been going for six months. The first one in our Australian sustainable energy series was an adaptation of David MacKay’s famous book Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air. This one, this first one, by Peter Seligman addresses the question of could we make a renewable energy system in Australia over 25 years and what it would cost, and whether it would provide for our energy needs. It comes to the conclusion: profoundly so.
The Zero Carbon Australia Stationary Energy Plan takes a much more aggressive approach and says can we do it in ten years with what we have available today? And it’s a fantastic, detailed, technically robust analysis of that, and it’s conclusion is a profound yes. It puts to bed the old myths that renewable energy can’t provide baseload; that they’re too expensive. But these aren’t showstoppers. The showstoppers probably lie in this house here; in the political will rather than the technical and financial details.

I want to finish just by commenting my own perspective on some of the challenges we face, and putting some numbers behind them. And I can’t resist referring to my own work. I’m a geologist – I work on the dynamics of the earth. The energy associated with the earth processes that make earthquakes; that make mountain ranges; that drive the plates around the planet – I want to put those into the context of our energy system just to give you a sense of the scale of the issue and the solutions that we’re faced with.

Currently we pump 28 billion tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere each year. What does that mean? Well, all the rivers on all the mountains right across the globe transport 28 billion tonnes of sediment to all the seas. What we’re doing to the atmosphere is the same as what erosion naturally does on the planet per day. That’s a sense of the scale.

To make that CO2, we consume 16 trillion energy – a rate of 16 trillion watts. Now that’s a very big number, but let’s put it in context. We live on a heat engine – the Earth is a heat engine. Plate tectonics is the process which drives continents; makes mountains, earthquakes, all those things. It’s the way the Earth gets rid of its heat. How much heat is it getting rid of? It’s getting rid of it at a rate of 44 trillion watts. Only a factor of three larger than where we’re at now in our own energy systems. That’s the planetary scale process. Worse than that – we’re doubling our rate every 34 years. So by 2060, we as human societies globally will be using, at current growth rates, the same energy as is released by our planet in making all the mountains, all the earthquakes, all the volcanoes. That’s a staggering thing, a scary thing.

By pumping the CO2 into the air, we’re just tweaking the greenhouse dial on the atmosphere a tiny per cent. About one per cent. It’s a tiny amount. And we’re trapping a little bit more heat. Where is that heat going? Most of that heat is going on the oceans. The most recent measurements on the oceans are truly staggering. They’re showing heat today is going into the ocean at 300 trillion watts – at a rate of 300 trillion watts - almost 20 times as much energy as we use, far more than is released by the planet in making geology work. It’s capturing about 0.3 per cent of the solar energy that’s hitting it to make that energy stop. We’ve turned on a pump. What it tells me is: that resource that it’s turned on, that sun is where our energy future lies if we’re to grow our energy systems in the future. So our challenge of course is to trap it. We need about 0.06 per cent of the sun hitting the continents to supply our energy needs. That’s quite a large amount.

Can we do it? Globally it’s a huge challenge. Australia is the renewable energy powerhouse of the world. We have less people and more sun than anywhere else. Our proportion of renewable resources is far larger than our proportion of coal resources which are only going to last a few more decades anyway, the way they’re being chewed up to meet global demand. So, our challenge is to look to the future of our energy systems globally and locally and provide road maps for ways of getting there.

This new plan, the Zero Carbon Australia, is a tremendous, technically detailed road map for us. It places Australia centrally as a renewable energy superpower, and we don’t know where that’s going to take us. But it will secure an energy supply for centuries, not decades. It’s somewhere we’ve got to get eventually and this provides us a start along that journey. Right here, right now, if we can master the political will to do so. Thank you.

[Applause]

Matthew Wright: So before I speak to Beyond Zero Emission’s efforts in producing this plan and I will talk bit about that journey that we went on, I’d just like to get some personal perspective from the very famous actor, Tom Long, who’s apparently quite inspired by our project.

Tom Long: [Interrupts] The famous actor, farmer actor. Everyone….I’m very excited by this, the Zero Carbon Plan, and everyone I’ve shown it to is very excited. I live in a very conservative electorate of Indi in Victoria, and no-one has – everyone’s very keen on it. To me, this Zero Carbon Plan, it’s about possibility and it’s about choice. And it just shows clearly how it’s technically possible to reach 100 per cent baseload renewable energy within a decade with the technology that we’ve already got right now. And by creating this plan for 100 per cent renewable energy within ten years, and not the distant future, it shows that I can and we can be responsible right now. That we have a choice to act right now. That we’ve got….and not pass the buck by putting it in the too hard basket – because we are accountable and we don’t want to throw up our hands and leave this for others to rectify.

So this Zero Carbon Plan, it shows us in a clear and tangible way how to reach 100 per cent renewable energy within the next ten years. That is a time frame that I can imagine, and the Zero Carbon Plan shows us that it is technically and economically possible and that we, and I, we all have a choice. And for the price of a cup of coffee per person per day, this can become a reality.
It shows it is possible, so let’s bring climate change debate right into the area of possibility and what is possible. I find the Zero Carbon Plan incredibly inspiring and it’s opened my mind to the possibility of zero carbon emissions by 2010. And I’d just like to congratulate everyone for their hard work at Beyond Zero and the Melbourne Uni. But, well done on a brave report. Thanks.
[Applause]

Matthew Wright: And again, thank you to Tom. Thank you to Senator Judith Troeth, Senator Nick Xenophon and Senator Christine Milne for joining us to celebrate - I guess – our launch. And it’s fitting that we’re launching today when the Renewable Energy Target is being debated in the Senate. Because this is about renewable energy, this is about 100 per cent renewable energy – and obviously that’s a pathway – once it gets ratcheted up a bit – to 100 per cent renewable energy.

CO2 carbon emissions are real and we’ve heard about that from Mike Sandiford, Professor Mike Sandiford, and we know that the use of fossil fuels, including burning coal, is a major contributor to loading our atmosphere with CO2. There’s already too much carbon in the atmosphere today, so we don’t need to choose pathways that load the atmosphere with more CO2. We now have the opportunity to leapfrog that, because, as I’ll tell you in a second, the technologies are already available to go straight to zero emissions. So as we retire carbon emitting sources of energy, we can replace them with 100 per cent renewable energy sources.

We see this plan as the Snowy Hydro of solar. This is our opportunity to put together the resources required – that’s the concrete, steel and glass, the labour force, the businesses, the industries, to get this job done. And what we’ve done in order to fast track that, to get it on track, is we’ve put together an expert team of scientists, engineers, experts in all fields – in all sorts of fields – including: chemical engineers, mechanical engineers, electrical engineers. We’ve got PhD students, they’re from industry, academia, from regulatory and they’ve been able to work together as a team. It’s about rolling the sleeves up and getting the job done. And they’ve really worked their guts out. Ten thousand – you know – thousands of hours of unpaid pro bono work, consulting time worth tens of thousands of dollars for each of them, and they’ve put that in and they’ve been willing to do this.

We got together with the university, and the university a major contributor to the project, almost half of the researchers are from Melbourne University. So we really thank them for making this happen. And their, certainly, assisting in the launch and publishing of the book is really helpful.

This is a part of a greater plan to look at each of the sectors of the economy: that’s buildings, transport –and some you don’t hear about – industrial processes, and land use change in forestry and agriculture. How can we become the renewable energy superpower and move away from being the old economy superpower to the new economy energy superpower? And given that we’ve got the renewable energy superpower resource, just like we had the fossil fuel superpower resource, it’s not going to be too difficult a transition.
So in terms of the actual plan itself: we designed 100 per cent of the renewable plan on what was commercially available now. It’s 60 per cent solar thermal with storage, so that’s large scale baseload solar plants. A sea of mirrors surrounds the central tower. Molten salt, a fluid, is pumped up the tower and receives the light of the sea of mirrors – just as you can see in the picture there. That is then trapped in large tanks, like giant thermos flasks and they hold the heat, and they can hold the heat to run the plant for 18 hours constant. Water is then pumped through the molten salt and flashed to steam. So just like in a coal, gas or nuclear plant, steam drives a conventional turbine. Instead of burning coal or a nuclear fission reaction, you get your heat from the large over-sized mirror field and it’s collected and it runs that turbine day and night. So that’s 24-hour solar power. It’s solar power around the clock. It’s solar power all through the night.

We also pair that with wind. Wind is the cheapest form of renewable energy. So as part of our design we tried to get as much wind penetration onto the modern electrical grid that you can get away with, with our upgraded, modernised grid. We came to the conclusion that 40 per cent wind power was a very safe number to settle with. With the backup, the energy security you get from the solar thermal with storage.

So think of the solar thermal with storage as your firming power, as your energy security – what you fall back on for backup. Today, that’s hydro dams and gas plants. In this plan, it’s solar thermal plants. So it’s a fairly straightforward swap of one kind of infrastructure for another that operate on the same principles. We modernised the electricity grid in conjunction with Sinclair Knight Merz who were very generous and gave us a lot of consulting time, and we designed an electricity sector – sorry, a national grid – that links the West Australian grid to the eastern seaboard grid. And this way we can do some time shifting things in the evening from West Australia to power the evening peak in use in the eastern states.

We see this as an investment in Australia’s future. At $37 billion a year, it’s consummate with what we spend on insurance. This is insurance for the future. It’s not only insurance from climate change, but also from energy price shocks. You see, the kind of fuel we’re powering our energy sector with now - oil, gas and coal - are linked to international commodity markets. With fluctuations in those markets that we’ve already seen, especially in oil and gas, with those fluctuations leading forever and ever increasing prices, Australian families and industry are not hedged, they’re not looked after with their future energy costs. In fact, what they are subject to is – they’re at the mercy of international energy markets. So if we go to renewable energy for our domestic industry, for our domestic families, then we’ll create an energy sector that’s going to lock in the cost of future energy. And it’s going to lock that in in a way that we can plan our business, our industry, our economy around.

We don’t take necessarily a position on what mechanisms it will take to get there – whether it’s feed-in tariffs that have been very successful in Germany and a number of places in driving the cost reduction curve, in getting the cost of renewable down to price parity with coal, whether it’s emissions trading schemes or carbon taxes. We say that if you take it as a national imperative, as something we want to do, the right policy mechanism will be chosen and we’ll get the right legislation through the Parliament, and we’ll just get on with the job and we’ll build it.

Companies like ACS in Spain, that owns Hochtief in Germany, which in turn owns Leighton Holdings in Australia, are ready to build these power plants now. They’re building $20 billion worth in Spain right now. Wind power in China – 100 per cent growth year on year. The price of the turbines is going to come down to half. So it’s a matter of getting on with the job like the rest of the world is. And the opportunity here is that Australia will maintain and have a piece of that global renewable energy boom pie. And my concern is: if we keep wavering, if we keep the head in the sand or the head in the coal pit, we will miss out on those opportunities. Because Australian innovation, including Australian National University here in Australia – in Canberra – University of New South Wales in Sydney, has leading researchers on an international scale leading technology.

So I think this is the end of the talk of half measures, of five per cent versus twenty per cent, it’s the end of the window dressing. It’s the beginning of getting on with the job, doing it, making it happen and creating a positive vision and carrying that through that the people can hold, touch, feel. And we like the tangibility and that’s what we aimed for, and I think we delivered that. Thank you.

[Applause]

OK. So if anybody wants to mingle and talk with everybody. Ah questions, of course. Yes. We’ll go to questions. I’ll get Patrick Hearps to join me. We’ll take questions here and then if people want questions of the senators, if they are happy, we can get them up as well. So, we’ll throw it to questions. Anybody.

Unnamed Woman: What do you think of your party’s policy on climate change and the strategy that would bring about the five per cent reduction through, basically direct grants, and definitely not having any form of a carbon price, which is what Tony Abbott says. Do you think that’s good enough on climate change?

Senator Judith Troeth: Look, it’s a start. I’d rather my party had a climate policy than not have one, and it’s a start. And I’ve always believed that we need action from the ground up, by at grassroots level as well as these mammoth industrialised type of schemes. So to me, it’s all part of the jigsaw. I’d much sooner that we had those policies rather than not have one at all. So to me it’s a good start.

Unnamed Woman: [indistinct] where he says he would very much like to see a carbon price and he thinks there’s been a failure of political leadership that we don’t have one locked in yet.

Senator Judith Troeth: Look, we didn’t get where we wanted to, where he wanted to get to and I wanted to get to last year. It’s an aspiration that we work towards. This is something in progress, or a movement in progress, I think, and we need to take stock now. But it’s all part of the jigsaw, and I can’t emphasise that enough. This is part of the jigsaw, what we would propose is also part of the jigsaw and it’s all got to work together.

Matthew Wright: Thank you. Any other questions? Also Professor Mike Sandiford and Tom would be happy to answer questions.

[Pause]

Alright, it looks like everybody’s happy. Look, thanks very much for coming. We really appreciate that you were all able to attend and give us your time today and look forward to working with you in the future. Thank you.

[Applause]