 Well, good morning and welcome everyone to the session on Australia's Accelerating Green Energy Transition. I hope everyone can hear and see everything okay at the moment. And I'd like to now just start off by acknowledging the traditional owners on the lands where the ANU resides. That is the Ngunnawal people and also the traditional owners on the land on which you are joining us at this meeting. My name is Professor Ken Baldwin. I am Director of the ANU Grand Challenge Zero Carbon Energy for the Asia Pacific. And it's my pleasure today to be chairing this session where we'll look at Australia's Accelerating Green Energy Transition and the implications that has for the economy and society over the coming years. The program today is that we will be, first of all, starting with a panel discussion with our panelists, followed by some questions amongst the panel. I'd also like to welcome any members of the media that have joined us today and to remind you that if you'd like to join the discussion on Twitter, then please use hashtag ACL forum as the handle. So now I'd like to introduce our panel and let me start with the first of our speakers today, Leanne Bond. Leanne has a background in engineering and is interested in the transition to low carbon energy sources. She's an independent non-executive chair of Mining 3 and a non-executive director of Snowy Hydro, Clean Energy Finance Corporation, Oricon Group, Synotech Corporation and the Kwaido Group. She's also engaged with the ANU in the Battery Storage and Grid Integration Program and is on the advisory board of the Master of Sustainable Energy at the University of Queensland. So welcome, Leanne. Next we have Deep Ma Tuvio. Deep Ma is science director at CSIRO where he heads the energy business unit and he has working with him a team of scientists, engineers, economists and business professionals in a multidisciplinary team that is looking at the challenges of the energy transition. Prior to this, Deep Ma was the director of the Australian Solar Thermal Research Institute or Astri. And then finally our panel member from Pollination, Martin Wilder. He is the founding director of Pollination, which is a global climate advisory and investment firm that's focused on developing innovative policies, ideas and investments that enable our economies to rapidly transition to net zero whilst preserving natural ecosystems. So Martin has a background in the sector, particularly in his association with the ANU, where he's adjunct professor of international climate change law. And he's also a member of the Wentworth Group of Concerned Scientists. So welcome, Martin. So now what I'd like to do is to offer each of our panelists the opportunity to speak for a few minutes on some of the key issues that they see in accelerating the green energy transition. And we will then follow that with some questions amongst panel members. So that after that, please get ready to put your own questions, which you can do, as I said before, by using the raise hand function in the toolbar at the bottom of your screen. So now what I'd like to do is to invite Leanne Bond to give us her perspective on what she believes to be the important aspects of the energy transition. Over to you, Leanne. Thank you, Ken. I'm coming to you here from Brisbane, which is the Agra and Turbo people and acknowledge the oldest past president emerging. I, as you've heard with my portfolio, enjoy a lot of different perspectives on this topic. I'm an engineer, a chemical engineer by background and started in the on and gas industry, the energy industry, and have really moved with this emerging topic. The first time I came across the concept of climate change was I was doing some environmental management study, probably in the 90s. And to be honest, I just thought it will be done. There's low hanging fruit. We'll work this through. I had seen the hole in the ozone layer in the 80s be closed because we banned CFCs. And I just thought that would happen. And I suppose I was a bit surprised later years later when I came back to the topic that we hadn't really done even energy efficiency. So it's interesting now that we're really focusing on technology as an engineer. I do think we can solve problems. So I'm intersecting with it I suppose through research, education, policy, technology and investment, which gives me a very interesting perspective on different ways of looking at this. All my comments today are personal but informed by my portfolio. So I think I was really heartened to hear yesterday from Joe Evans and from our treasurer. But Joe said, you know, this is all fact, no room here for belief. And I think that's a big, a big change that has happened in the last year or two. I think people do accept that there is an issue and anyone that saw the IPCC report presentation yesterday would understand. So what needs to happen? Well, if I just describe very briefly some of the things I'm involved in. So arena and CFC obviously drove a lot of funding in the early days for renewables and continue to do that. But now I'm moving on to strengthening the grid, supporting transmission and decarbonising other sectors, property transfer, transport, agriculture, looking to how do we bring in electric vehicles and hydrogen. So a lot of these things, it's a financing challenge. In the beginning solar and wind, the business payback wasn't clear. So there was a role there. Now banks are more able to fund. But a lot of the emerging solutions don't yet have markets and hydrogen. There was a comment yesterday about supply chain for hydrogen. It just doesn't exist yet. So it needs to be built. Snowy is obviously heavily involved in also firming the NEM through building the Snowy 2.0 project additional pump storage and already plays that role with its current portfolio, supporting the NEM when it needs firming. We're also building the heart of power project for gas peaking to fill that gap as well. Our economy and synodic are probably looking at it from an internal perspective, but also how to assess clients. All of the listed companies are now realising that they need for their investors and their staff to make commitments to transitioning and also for their risk profile. So there's a big role there in both developing solutions and applying existing solutions, but also developing new technologies. In my role as chair of mining 3, we spend a lot of time thinking about sustainability of the mining industry and how to have a smaller footprint, but also be there to develop the critical minerals that we will need for this. And you know, through the University Queensland, we're training the next generation of people who are going to solve these problems. So the Master of Sustainable Energy takes people who are already in an industry of some sort and gives them the skills and the thinking that they need to be able to engage with this topic and solve some of these problems. And the Battery Storage Grid Integration project is more into the deep research that we need. So I really get that there's a lot of different things we have to do, not just one thing. And I think really the people who first caught onto the need to reimagine our energy and our carbon footprint was really insurers. Now investors, staff, customers, everyone is engaged in this topic. So I think I might leave it there. There's definitely a pace at which people are engaging with this topic, and I'm looking forward to this discussion. Thank you very much, Leanne. Now I'd like to call on Deepa Turbier to say a few words on the topic. Thank you, Deepa. Yeah, thank you very much, Ken. And I would also like to acknowledge the traditional owners of the land I'm calling in from. I'm on the monoclonal peninsula south of Melbourne. And the traditional owners are the Boon Warring people of the Kulin Nation and pay my respect to their eldest past, present and emerging. As you can probably tell from my accent, I'm not Australian, I'm German, and I moved to Australia three years ago. And before I joined here, I actually had 20 years at GE developing technology in the energy space. So I'm very happy to see that Australia is choosing a technology path. And as you can imagine the CSIRO, we're right in the middle of that. A lot of what Leanne just said earlier resonated with what I'd like to say, the transition that the whole world is going through, not just Australia, towards net zero emission energy is a large undertaking. And it's not a one size fits all and one silver bullet will solve the problems or the challenges that we have. That's not problem problems. So at CSIRO, we're looking at this at multiple areas that are connected, but often discussed in isolation. And what we hear often about, talked about is the electricity transition. And I think most of what we've heard recently yesterday as well and what we are hearing today is focusing around how do we change the electricity sector towards net zero. And we shouldn't forget that the electricity sector is just a part of what the energy overall energy segment is. So at CSIRO, we're looking at the electricity transition, of course, but we're also looking at transport transition and the industry transition. And what is the shift that needs to be done in terms of technology development to get us through that transition? And one of the things I keep reminding people of is that the transition of the industry and also the transport will have an effect on electricity. If all the energy we're providing to our industry and also through transport is either electric or through hydrogen or through alternative fuels, ultimately it boils down to having more electricity that's needed. And I think can our discussion today will go in that direction. So in order to accelerate that, the scale of the transition is going to become an important issue that needs to be addressed. And the fourth area, which for Australia is one of the big areas, is of course export. Today, Australia exports a lot of energy. Also the energy we produce, we export. How do we transition an export sector to a net zero energy sector? And that's going to be the vast, the largest challenge that Australia is going to have and that we need to focus on. And not to forget, we do have a fifth area and that is the environment and the community engagement. So whatever technology solution we come up with, whatever technology solution we finance, we put into the system, we shouldn't forget to bring the community along. And for me, that is one of the challenges also we see in Australia. And it's not only land use of PV systems, but it's also job changes. Jobs will change from fossil energy over to renewable energy. And yes, I do believe there will be more jobs needed in aggregate. The jobs will be different. So we need to make sure that we don't forget our social sciences, which is also part of science and the technology as well. And I do like also what Leanne said earlier. A big change to me growing up in Germany 20, 30 years ago, where there was a big challenge for the energy vendor that officially was launched I think 11 years ago. It was not an accepted fact yet that there is a climate change, that has changed dramatically over the last 10 years. So the world is moving to accepting it as a fact that we do have to change. And another big change is the cost of photovoltaics, for example. I started working in photovoltaics in the 80s. And I think they were a factor of 200 or 300 more expensive than today. And everybody was saying they will never get below fossil fuels. And look where we are today. And I think we're not, we haven't hit bottom yet. They're still a long way to go. And that's where I think from CSRO, where technology development is still critical for us. Can we solve the challenges today with technology? Yes, we can. We have the technologies available to make that transition. It'll take time to get us there and it'll cost a lot of money. So we shouldn't forget the economic factor here. And that's where new technology is going to be needed to get a more economical solution for this transition. So as Leanne was saying earlier, there's a lot of things that need to be done. It's not a one thing that needs to be resolved. So at CSRO we do work on various different technology just mostly driven to getting better efficiencies, getting lower costs. And that goes across the spectrum from new PV cells to better hydrogen production, better hydrogen storage, better transport, hydrogen carriers. But it also goes to cleaner fossil fuels. Because one of the things I do want to bring up, this transition is not going to happen overnight. It's going to happen over a couple of decades. So there's going to be a phase out of our fossil fuels. It's not going to be stopping fossil fuels. So we need to find also ways to help that, through that phase of the transition for our fossil fuel to be cleaner. And that does include, in my opinion, things like carbon capture and storage as well. It may be a transition solution, but that transition takes a while. So it's not a short or very short term solution. And the other thing, yes, we need to remember that this is not a refilled, and I think that goes along with that phase out. We're not starting from scratch. We do have an energy system today. And the big challenge for us in Australia is going to be to take where we are today and move that as quickly as possible to the end state that we're all striving for. And that transition will impact a lot of people's lives, a lot of people's jobs, because it's going to take a couple of decades. And so that is what, in my opinion, is the largest challenge that we have here. I can live it at that in that passive appeal. Terrific. Thank you very much, Editha. So now I'd like to call on Martin Wilder to provide his perspective on the transition. Thank you, Martin. Thanks very much, Ken. And I think, likely, Anne, I come from a broad background, both looking at this at the moment from an investment perspective, both here and overseas, and also for many years, chaired Low Carbon Australia, which was the precursor to CFC, was on the board of that, and then chaired Arena for quite some time. So we've seen over that period a rapid change. I guess I just wanted to reflect on a couple of things that have partly been brought up, but just from a slightly, so a different perspective. So the first is around technology. So we often talk about the technology being now. I think in Australia, we often get to see a lot of the international technologies last. So there's a lot of things that are emerging all the time around the world on energy transition technology. We are probably at the moment seeing five to 10 incredible innovations a week, of which probably 70% will never work, but 30% are actually leapfrogging ahead of what is going on. So I think one of the interesting things there is just the speed at which the technology is moving. I think one of the real challenges with that technology, though, is integration and how do you integrate that into an existing and evolving system and also the issue of risk mitigation. So when you're looking at a new technology and incorporating that into an existing facility or into a new process, how do you actually, who bears the risk of that? And that has been one of the barriers which we've seen today, and that's a role that the government can probably play more of a role in. Secondly, I think this is all about systems change. It's not just about the change of putting a new wind farm or putting in a new solar farm or a new battery system. This is about, we have to look at this through the entire system being transformed, and a lot of the work I think that's going on in Europe at the moment is about how do you actually move an entire car manufacturing system away from petrol to electric. And when you look at what's happening with the number of battery gigafactories in Europe that have emerged in the last 12 months, the rate of change is phenomenal. And so when we look at this issue, we have to look at it at a more, at a broader level, which is everything from as Leanne was talking about, the minerals that we take out of the ground, all the way through to, through creating the technologies all the way through to recycling what comes out the other end, wind farms and solar panels, etc. And so that is a whole of an economic change. It's about building new manufacturing sectors. It's about doing all of that, and it's really important that we look at this energy transition through more of a systemic view. The next point is when we look at a lot of industrial decarbonisation, that's also an area that is challenging. And I think people often think, oh well, we'll just tell an aluminium smelter to change. But when you look at what happened with Portland, there are multiple parties involved in changing or in transitioning a large energy user there. And rather than just having the status quo, it actually requires everybody working together. So it requires government, the plant owners, the workforce, the technology providers, the alternatives to come up and think together in a package. And it's like doing a large sort of project in effect. It's not, you can't just anticipate that the time ago, somebody else will just change. It actually requires a team of people within the ecosystem to actually work through how that is going to happen over a long period. And then again, coming back to this issue of how you manage the transition risk. Another key point then is also the issue around finance. So I think at the moment, there is a huge amount of money that's in the system, private money being being pushed towards technology and towards this energy transition. But one of the challenges is the very large super funds really are wanting to write checks of up to a billion to two to three billion dollars for a lot of the investments they make. And a lot of the a lot of the energy technologies we see are actually require much smaller funding. So one of the challenges is how do you actually fund the ideas that need to come through the system? And I think there's a tremendous amount of money for, well, there's money for VC emerging, there's quite a lot for PE and there's a lot of super fund money, but there's a very limited amount of money to actually develop the transition changes that we need. And I think that's an area where, and this is even pre- arena sort of type funding. This is very early stage. And at the moment where you've probably seen a lot of the large investors and the institutional investors starting to come further down the chain. So they're coming from large scale investing to PE. But this idea of needing to fund the development of ideas and how to transition economies, which is a role that people like the CSRO and universities and others can take and government itself, that is where the big gap is at the moment. And so we're seeing that more overseas in Australia, but we actually need to have more of that focus on how do we actually work out how we're going to transition the entire sector and rebuild manufacturing, for example, in Australia. So when the state government in use of oil says we want 8,000 electric buses, the thinking should be okay, well rather than just buying those buses from overseas, how do we actually, from the ground up, build an entire sector that's based on renewable energy to really, to include bus manufacturing and drive that at scale very fast and then make that an export industry. The other point I just wanted to make was also around, around what are some of the other drivers here. So there are two. One is, is the legal driver. There are currently 18 pieces of litigation going on in Australia against, against major banks and other investors for investing in fossil fuels. Whether or not you agree with that, those, that litigation, one of the impacts that it's having is many of the banks and financial institutions are no longer going to fund, I guess, fossil fuels are already withdrawing from that. They're already a bit scared to fund gas and so the cost of capital and the availability of capital is fundamentally shifting. And it's happening at speed and it's happening very quickly. And I think the change that you've seen over the last six months is quite dramatic. But the, but the challenge with this is that this litigation does have an impact on timing, on investing and on the willingness of investors to put money into various areas. So as Leanne and Dipma were talking about shareholders, I mean, we are seeing this pressure really play out in the finance sector. And I think people probably underestimate that. And then finally, the other issue is geopolitics. So as we see a lot of the, as we see China pushing more into getting rare earths and other minerals from areas like like Africa, a lot of talk about them trying to access it from Afghanistan. What opportunities are there for Australia in the shifting geopolitics in terms of of taking our base of rare earths and our base of other minerals to be using those and strategically positioning ourselves in this sort of change in geopolitics. I think there's huge opportunity for Australia across the entire value chain of energy, all the way through digging up minerals, all the way through recycling. We need to look at it in a more holistic way. And I think that's where the massive opportunity for us sits. And a key player in that is transmission. And then the final point I'll just make is that a lot of this is difficult. A lot of this hasn't been done before. I think people often think that this is easy. And some of the technologies that we're talking through, even how do you integrate solar on your roof to cars to bring back into the grid is pretty straightforward. But it's something that even that is still evolving. So a lot of things that I think we sometimes take for granted that are easy to do, I still have to be done. But it's I think there's a huge opportunity for us. And and we just have to make sure that we play it properly. Thank you very much, Martin. So now that we've heard from all three panelists today, we'll now just have a quick discussion amongst the group and and invite you while we're doing that to think of questions that you might wish to ask the panel. And you can then do that by using the raise hand function on the tablet bottom of your screen. So one of the things I think that's not widely recognised by not only people overseas, but people in Australia is that despite the fact that we've had, you know, essentially policy chaos in this country over the last decade or more in the in the climate and energy space, that Australia is actually now leading the world in the transition of the electricity sector. We're installing solar and wind generating capacity at a faster rate per person than any other country. In fact, 10 times faster than the world average. So our electricity sector is leading the charge, if you like, internationally in terms of the transition that is being undertaken. And this by and large is driven mainly by the sheer economics of the price structure for solar and wind. And as Steve Myers mentioned, the cost of solar panels now is factors of several hundred less than it was back in the 80s. And it's very hard to imagine any other technology that has undergone such a rapid reduction. So my question to the panel is, while we're world leaders at the moment and we can see our way maybe over the next couple of years to reaching 50 percent of renewable electricity by the mid-2020s or approaching 100 percent in the 2030s, perhaps, what are the bottlenecks? What are the barriers that might get in the way of this happening? As Leanne said earlier, she thought back in the day when the ozone layer had been closed that the same could be done for climate change and global warming. Well, we're now moving rapidly down the path in terms of the adoption of renewables by the private sector. What can get in the way of completing this process and extending this to other sectors? I'd like to hear the panel's views on that. Leanne, would you like to say something? Just unmuting. Yes. So there's lots of things that could get in the way, but I think the reference to the system and the system we are built on for our electricity sector was designed in a very different way. I think initially a lot of engineers were saying this can't be done, but now it is happening and so now it's how do we do it? I think there's a lot of decisions being made about how to strengthen our grid. There are requirements for transmission so that we can move energy to where it's needed and it's the intermittent nature. So there's again a framework that's got to be developed to allow people to invest and there are investments happening, but for instance, the Snowy 2 project, we have the backing of government, so I'm not sure whether a private company could have made that decision, but I think those models of how do we actually present a framework for a private investment to carry the heavy load is one of those. Yes and perhaps Martin, going back to your earlier question about unlocking investment, is there a role for government in this? I mean what we're seeing is a charge being led by and large by industry at the moment and as I said previously, it's been done in the background of policy chaos, at least in the federal system here in Australia. So what is your view in terms of unlocking the investment that's needed from a government perspective? Yeah, I think I think there are probably two key things that are required. The first is that unfortunately at the moment the states don't view energy policy or the way they approach energy as an issue that's what's best for the system, it's more what's best for the state. So one of the big issues was we need it and we're now getting transmission lines between different states, but for a long time the focus was on in Queensland we're going to build this energy in New South Wales, we're going to build this, we're going to build these renewable energy zones without necessarily too much thought as to what that means for an interconnected system. I think the first thing we need to do is having the states work together, particularly where there's disagreements for the federal government. So thinking about what's best for the NEM as opposed to what's just best for their state and that ultimately then means what's best for Australia because if you're trying to build a manufacturing industry on hydrogen for example how do you coordinate that at a country level as opposed to state level? I think the other the second key issue is risk and risk mitigation. So you know you need to one of the challenges with the renewable energy zones and with some of the rules is that around the senior rules was obviously you have the challenge that the generation won't come to the transmission is guaranteed, the transition won't come to the generations there. So you need to there's been a lot of work around this but where someone's either coming into building new technologies they need to know that they can put it on the ground that can be financed and they can therefore get the finance. So the governments can play a really important role there in terms of underwriting new assets into the system or underwriting the risk and at the end of the day when we did the large-scale solar funding round at arena everybody said that wasn't feasible it wasn't going to be possible. We didn't have people in Australia who knew how to build those solar farms, we didn't have banks and you had to finance them and but going through that process that basically de-risked the process and at the end result was that the cost came down and you've found ways to make that happen. So I think government can play a very important role in short-term risk mitigation which ultimately I don't think there really is much risk because if it's done properly people will find solutions to make it work. Thank you Martin and Dima from the perspective of moving beyond the electricity sector we see that this is accounting for roughly a third of our emissions and a similar sort of fraction of our total energy use. What about the other sectors in the economy and as you mentioned earlier what about the export sectors that are beckoning in terms of shift from fossil fuel exports to renewable energy exports? Yeah that's a tricky one Ken. Before you go there I want to respond to something Leanne said about the need for the system to be strengthened. There could be a barrier. I want to make sure we don't forget that when we do transition all the sectors simultaneously the transport sector will require another 70 to 100 gigawatts electricity that we don't have today. So when we design the system for transmission distribution and storage at the right spaces we need to make sure we have the future development of the entire system in mind and not just solve the problems that we're seeing today. So we need to solve the problems that will occur in the next couple of decades. So I want to make sure that we keep that in mind. And I'm confounded with that the export sector as you mentioned when you look at the energy flow in Australia the export sector is about 20 times the amount of energy that we actually use domestically. So there are a couple of ways to solve that challenge. One of it is to export the same amount of energy but as renewable energy. I don't think that's feasible. I think that it's first of all the world will probably not import that much energy when it's renewable energy. And second of all it's probably not feasible for Australia to build an industry that generates 20 times the amount of energy that we have today in Australia in terms of renewable energy. That's just going to be a big challenge for us to do. So another way to solve that is think about shifting our export products into more value added products. Putting energy into products that we then export rather than exporting directly the energy. So it will be a mix. We will still in the future export some energy some form of green energy in terms of either hydrogen itself or in terms of HVDC lines into Polynesia. And so that will be part of it. But at the end of the day for us to continue to export that form of energy I think it will be important to embed that into more value added products that could be sub-products of N solutions. For example it could be parts of an overall car or it could be pre-processed or it could be or pre-processed any other minerals rather than shipping the raw minerals. So the solution for us in the export sector to still continue having a big export market is to think about partly exporting the clean energy but also partly exporting green products that are produced in Australia with green energy. Yes, indeed. Good. I think we might now wrap up the session. We're getting close to the closing time. So I think we've had a very good discussion here about Australia's energy transition and some of the challenges and some of the opportunities as well that we face. And I think that one of the key points that has come out of this is that there are not only many things need to be done but there are also many players and many drivers that will make this happen. It's not just up to one sector of the community or one sector of the economy that will make this transition work. It's really across the entire range. And I'd like to just wrap up by thanking our panelists again. Thank you to Leanne Bond. Thank you to Martin Wilder and thank you to Dick Martuvie for providing their insightful perspectives today. Thank you again to the audience for your participation and your questions. We keep an eye on the chat function. So if you have other questions that we haven't answered, perhaps we can answer those online for you. And we again thank the Crawford Leadership Forum for the opportunity to talk about these really important issues with you here this morning. So thank you everyone and we look forward to seeing you at subsequent events. Thank you very much.