 The topic for the annual solar aeration for 2020 is transitioning the world to 100% clean renewable energy with a very important side topic which is how the US election will affect the transition and it's hosted by the annual energy change institute. So my name is Professor Andrew Blakers and I'm from the annual College of Engineering and Computer Science and a member of the annual energy change institute. I'd like to begin by acknowledging and celebrating the first Australians on whose traditional lands we meet and pay our respects to their elders past and present. Please note that this is a public forum and the media may be present. So before we move to Professor Jacobson, who's the main speaker, as is traditional, the ACT Minister for Climate Change and Sustainability, Shane Raffenbrie, will provide his traditional short update on progress in Canberra towards zero emissions. So Shane, over to you. You have to unmute Shane. Thanks Andrew, I'm the first person to do it in the call already. Thanks for the opportunity to speak today and hello everyone, it's great to hear you. See you today and I look forward to hearing Mark's presentation very shortly. Thanks Andrew for that acknowledgement of the traditional custodians and also to the ANU for hosting this event once again, it's a terrific opportunity each year. Look it has been a challenging year for a whole lot of reasons. Here in the ACT, of course, we started the year experiencing the bushfires, we've had the pandemic, but I'm pleased to be able to provide some good news today in the context of 2020. Firstly, as I think many on the call will know, we have reached our 100% renewable electricity target here in the ACT and we are now empowered entirely by zero emissions electricity. It is an important milestone that has attracted local investment and I think has also inspired other jurisdictions to act and to see what is possible. The second piece of good news, which is not fully public yet, but I'm pleased to share with you today is that we have reduced the ACT's emissions by 40% below 1990 levels, which is our target and we've achieved that in this financial year as was planned. This has been largely achieved through that move to renewable electricity. When we set that emissions reduction target back in 2010, to be honest, it wasn't clear exactly how we'd get there, but I think what we've done in setting that target and getting to it is demonstrate the importance of setting targets and then setting off an implementation pathway to achieve those targets and I think the Santa Feudal government could learn from that process. Now, of course, we can't stop there and we still have much to do. Firstly, let me talk about maintaining our 100% renewable electricity. To maintain that target, we do need to deliver additional capacity. We need to continue to improve energy efficiency and of course we need to focus on energy storage. You may have seen that, of course, earlier this year, we ran another reverse auction and we secured through that an additional 200 megawatts of power, which is designed to meet the ACT's growing population, but also as we have increased electrification of our system, we will need more power coming into the system. So we've procured an additional 200 megawatts of wind energy and 60 megawatts of battery storage as part of that reverse auction and those auctions were delivered at significantly lower prices than the previous auctions, with an average price below $50 a megawatt hour for that wind capacity, which is about a third lower than previous auctions. But despite that extra capacity being brought into the system, we still expect the overall cost of the scheme for ACT households to remain below $4.90 per household per week. So I think that's a significant achievement. We'll also continue to roll out the next gen battery storage program for households and small businesses. And we're also looking at further ways to encourage battery storage, including the commitment announced during the election campaign to install a 250 megawatt big battery here in the ACT. Energy efficiency remains important for maintaining our 100% renewable electricity supply in a cost effective way. And of course, it also helps households and businesses to reduce their energy costs and improve comfort. And we will place a greater focus on improving energy efficiency and shifting to all electric households, particularly in public housing and rental properties as part of the just transition. That idea that we need to, of course, make sure we look after our lowest income households as we make the shift. And through the parliamentary and governing agreement that's just been signed between ourselves and the Labor Party, there is a commitment to an minimum energy performance standards for all rental properties in the ACT in 2021. So to pass the legislation next year with a stage rollout over the next couple of years. And that's really important for traditionally here in Canberra, rental housing stock has been the lowest quality stock in terms of energy efficiency and thermal comfort. In terms of meeting our next emissions reduction target, which is 2025, where we have a commitment to reduce emissions by 60%, two big challenges for us. That's transport and gas. Transport now makes up around 60% of our emissions. And natural gas use or fossil fuel gas is around 20%. And so it's vital that we focus on cutting emissions in these sectors. To address transport, of course, that is a complex area in a car dominated city where most of our emissions do come from that private motor vehicle use. But we have committed to improving walking and cycling infrastructure, as well as introducing further measures to encourage the uptake of electric vehicles. And so we'll see a new policy to have free vehicle registration for two years for electric vehicles as soon as we can pass the regulations for that. And also we'll be installing 50 public charging stations across the city and offering interest free loans up to $15,000 for the purchase of a new electric vehicle. Just towards the end of last term, I announced that the new hospital expansion at Canberra Hospital, a big new emergency department out there will be gas free. It'll be an all electric development that's, we believe, the first of its kind in Australia and one of the first globally to do that. The new CIT at Woden will also be gas free. We've now got several of our new schools that have been built in the ACT coming online as gas free or electric development. So we really started to accelerate that move to have gas free buildings and really have them roll out as all electric. Of course, we're going to be doing some serious work through this term to think about grid reliability as part of that shift to all electric. So that's a quick update on where we're up to in the ACT and some of the policies that are due to be rolled out as part of the new government. We've only been in place for a couple of weeks, but certainly that's the direction we're heading in. A lot of that has been achieved by collaboration with groups such as the ANU with Arena, working with other jurisdictions and working with industry. And we look forward to that continued collaboration. So thanks again, Andrew, for the opportunity to update. And I look forward to hearing Mark's comments. Well, thank you very much, Shane. It's very encouraging as Canberra moves to zero emissions in 2045. Is it the current year 2045? If not before. So for the the main speaker will be along in a moment. And I'd like you to think of questions you might like to ask him in the Q&A session a little later. And if you look down the bottom of your screen, you can see a Q&A button that you can press and lodge a written question. And we'll try and get through as many questions as we can. But if there are too many, then you'll be able to email questions to energy.change at anu.edu.au until Thursday. And we'll try and follow up. So the 2020 solar orator is Professor Mark Jacobson, who is director of the atmosphere energy program and professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford University. Professor Jacobson has a long and very distinguished career spanning several different fields. And has been really quite influential in the United States around questions and around the world indeed, around questions of moving to zero emissions energy systems. So Mark will speak for about 50 minutes and then we'll have about half an hour or so of questions from the audience. So Mark, over to you. Okay, thank you very much, Andrew. Let me just share my screen here and I get that started. Yes, speaking to your screen, that's good. Yeah, thanks very much for your kind introduction and invitation, Andrew. And also congratulations, Shane, on the success of the ACT. It's amazing to see the region being 100% renewable electricity and going further to go to all energy. So I want to talk about roadmaps to transition cities, states, countries and the world to 100% clean renewable energy and also discuss policies related to that, specifically what's going on in the US in terms of policies, especially after the election that just finished. So first of all, what's the problem? Why do we care? Why do we want to transition? Well, from my point of view, I've always looked at this not only from a climate point of view where global warming is expected to cost the world about 20 to $35 trillion per year by 2050, but also an air pollution and energy security point of view worldwide. Seven million people die from air pollution from fossil fuel and biofuel combustion. And that presently in terms of statistical cost of life cost about $30 trillion per year, even that's based on statistical cost of life. And fossil fuels are also scarce resource, limited resources and they will become scarce over time and that will eventually increase energy prices and economic, political and social instability. So we really need to address this problem before it becomes serious on top of the other problems. And there are other energy and security issues as well, including reliance on energy that you have to transport long distances. Anyway, these are all drastic problems that require immediate solutions. So this, well, so our idea has always been to electrify everything and provide, well, electrify everything or provide direct heat and provide the electricity and heat with 100% clean renewable energy, namely wind and water and solar power. So by wind and water and solar, that's onshore and offshore wind, solar photovoltaics on rooftops and in power plants, concentrated solar power and CSP, geothermal electricity and heat and also some solar heating as well as electricity, hydroelectric power, mostly existing hydroelectric power and then small amounts of tidal wave power. And so those are the electricity options but we'd electrify transportation with combination of battery electric vehicles for passenger vehicles, most medium and late duty vehicles, even a short distance aircraft, short distance ships, but for long distance, heavy transport like long distance ships and planes and some long distance trucks and long distance trains, hydrogen fuel cells where the hydrogen is produced by electricity and then the hydrogen reproduces electricity in a fuel set. And then for heating and cooling of buildings, we'd use mostly electric heat pumps and some solar hot water preheating, some geothermal direct heat we use for high density urban areas, some district heating and cooling for industry, we would electrify that as well with pretty much existing technologies on a larger scale, so arc furnaces, induction furnaces, resistance furnaces, dielectric heaters, electron beam heaters, these are all existing technologies and then all the electricity for everything including the hydrogen which you can produce by electrolysis from electricity we provide with wind, water and solar. So just some updates, so I mean you all have seen wind turbines that extract kinetic energy from the wind and convert it to electricity, nice thing about wind is it doesn't actually take much land on the ground because it's mostly space in between wind turbines so you can use that for multiple purposes such as farming and rangeland and cropland but you might need a lot of them. Offshore wind, of course there's no land required and now they're floating offshore wind and in fact large floating offshore wind turbines are being built and proposed right now and this is great because that allows wind to be put far enough offshore that people don't have to see it and also allows wind in some locations like offshore California where the bathymetry is pretty deep, the water depth gets pretty deep pretty fast in the US on the East Coast it's pretty shallow out to about three or 400 kilometers because during the last ice age it was all land but on the West Coast it goes deep pretty fast so it's they're not too many places where you can put and drill a turbine tower right into the ground into the ocean floor but floating changes the whole game and this really allows this will really allow many countries to go to 100% renewable energy for all purposes because they're just so much offshore wind available including in Australia. For solar, we'll notice we've seen solar on rooftops and in utility scale solar farms but solar is also growing over water now not only reservoirs but some in the ocean and some places where you can cordon off an area of the ocean and make sure the waves aren't too heavy over canal so you can pretty much put solar anywhere. The nice thing is solar can also go at high latitudes and by tilting and tracking the sun in fact most people don't know this but the location worldwide where you have the most solar resource if you had a PV panel that tracks the sun in the annual average is over the South Pole. You get partly because it's elevated but you actually can track the sun perfectly part of well at least three months of the year there's 100% sunlight but you're not gonna build transmission to the South Pole but that's just a fun fact but the point is that you really can put solar anywhere on earth and get some reasonable resource if you combine it with either storage or other or lots of wind for example to complement it seasonally or daily. Now for transportation there's been a growth of electric vehicles and not only passenger vehicles as we all know but also trucks, buses, ships and even aircraft. So here's an example on the left, a Tesla semi truck which goes 850 kilometers purely on batteries. On the right is a Nicola Tray semi hydrogen fuel cell truck that goes up to 1200 kilometers on hydrogen fuel cells. On the bottom left is an electric ferry and on the bottom right is a electric bus. So they're on the order of a million electric buses already out there on the road in the world most of them are in China but many countries of sales most countries probably have some electric buses by now. Now electric aircraft are starting to take off so to speak. On the left here is a nine seat battery electric aircraft that flew on the right is a four seat hydrogen fuel cell aircraft. We think that heavy duty like 747 type aircraft long distance will have to be hydrogen fuel cell whereas short and medium distance will be electric and you might have some hybrids. But I mean you can transition everything including military vehicles, tanks and armored vehicles, helicopters that can be either electric or hydrogen fuel cell but again the heavy stuff is mostly gonna be hydrogen because there's a certain tipping point in which it's more efficient obviously to use electricity as much as you can just batteries, battery electricity but at some point when you get to heavy and long distance enough you have to carry around too many batteries that weighs in the favor of hydrogen but that might change depending on the technologies being developed. Okay so for storage we're gonna need electricity storage hot and cold storage and hydrogen storage. So for electricity storage there's concentrated solar power associated with storage pumped hydroelectric power with storage existing hydroelectric dams are basically big batteries batteries themselves, flywheels compressed air storage gravitational storage with solid masses I'll show you an example of that in a minute for heating and cooling where there's water tanks for hot water tanks and cold water tanks boilers and chillers as they're known as ice is a form of storage and then there's underground seasonal energy storage in boreholes, water pits and aquifers and I'll show you some examples of that in a second and then building materials another form of storage and hydrogen is also a way to store energy. Now with regard to hydrogen we propose they're used primarily as I mentioned for long distance heavy transport not so much for electricity except maybe in microgrids and there are some applications where you use them instead of batteries but in non microgrids and microgrids they can be used for both electricity and heat production but otherwise batteries are more efficient so but you can do an analysis every few years to see whether hydrogen is competitive or better than batteries at some point for electricity generation but not right now for sure but batteries of all these technologies are the most expensive but their cost is coming down really rapidly and so you see huge battery and solar hybrid plants going up even wind batteries and solar hybrid plants in Australia especially you see several of these and they're very effective and because batteries can provide electricity instantaneously even faster than natural gas or especially faster than other types of peaking power they're really desirable if we can get their cost down even more than the game is pretty much over in terms of keeping the grid reliable. So let me just give some examples of some of these storage technologies this is gravitational storage with solid masses two examples on the left. Well, if you have wind excess wind you can use it to power a motor to lift concrete blocks or rocks like with these cranes and then a motor runs in reverse as a generator as you lower the concrete blocks. So when you need electricity you lower the concrete blocks when you have extra electricity with them and these are very efficient and ostensibly very cost effective they're similar to pumped hydro power in their efficiency and it operates on the same principle because pumped hydro basically when you have extra electricity you pump water up a hill when you need electricity you let the water flow down a hill and run a go through a turbine to produce electricity through generator. Now these trains on the right they are filled with either rocks or concrete and they run on the same principle if you have extra electricity you push the train up the hill and then you need electricity you let it roll down the hill and run a generator and so again these are relatively efficient over 80% efficient and they're starting to become commercialized. Now these are boilers and chillers as I mentioned briefly but this is a district heating system so my university Stanford in 2016 built a fourth generation district heating system so there was actually a natural gas cogeneration plant right outside my office and that produced 80% of the campus electricity and heat and that was replaced by these two chillers and a boiler and hundreds of kilometers of pipeline throughout the university to pipe hot and cold water to buildings and the heat and the cold are provided by electric heat pumps and so then the electricity Stanford then bought or purchased 120 megawatts of solar put 10 megawatts on rooftops and then two power plants of 15, 60 megawatts solar power plant to upset the electricity and so the second power plant is almost done it'll be done in 2021 and when that's done the campus will be 100% renewable not only for electricity but also heating and cooling and so it replaced the entire natural gas plant and the system is very reliable so this is district heating can be done lots of campuses and also in cities and high density areas but it's very effective here's another type of district heating system with underground borehole storage this is in Okatoks Canada in 2004 and five there are 52 homes that were built on the top left there in the garage of these solar collectors were put and the solar collectors contain a glycol solution so in the summer when the days are very long that glycol solution absorbs heat the solution is then piped to this building on the right where the heat is transferred to water a water is then piped under ground under this field that under the field U shaped holes were drilled and U shaped pipes were put in so that hot water goes down it transfers the heat to the soil and then it comes up cold and it goes back in the loop and that heat is stored in the soil for up to six months until winter when the snow is on the ground like on the left, bottom left and then the whole system is running reverse and that heat from the soil provides 100% of a heating for these 52 homes and while batteries cost on the order of 200 to 300 US dollars per kilowatt hour of electricity storage the storage portion of this only costs less than a dollar a kilowatt hour for the heat storage but it's thermal electricity so it's very it's actually inexpensive to run in is very reliable even though the efficiency is not great it's only like a 58% round trip efficiency of the sun coming in in the summer to the heat coming back in the winter which is much less than batteries it's so cheap you can afford to waste some of the energy there this is a similar seasonal districating system this is in Vogen's Denmark and Denmark has several of these where there's a water pit and that's like looks like a swimming pool and it's filled with water and these solar collectors during the summer mostly will heat the water the water is then insulated on top with a covering and the water heats up to about 80 degrees Celsius and during the winter especially but all year that hot water is used to heat about 2,300 homes for the city so it's a districating system and these are more these should be more common because this one also is very inexpensive relative to electricity storage for example another type of storage that most people are not familiar with is ice storage actually my university since 1998 had a big ice cube under a building and at night when electricity price was low it was used to produce ice and then during the day instead of running air conditioning waters run through coils in the ice and sent to the buildings to cool the buildings and so this is like battery storage because it avoids air conditioning demand in the afternoon which runs on electricity however it costs about 1 tenth the battery costs per kilowatt hour of battery storage so this is another cost effective way these are used in stadiums and hospitals in a lot of places in the world so let's then move to well can we transition an individual home because it really starts at the ground up if we want to get rid of fossil fuels we have to do it in our own lives as well so I had the lucky opportunity to be able to build my own home and it was completed in 2017 and when I built it I made sure there's no gas going on the property and it's all electric including the vehicles and efficient energy efficient so I put solar on the roof of course and it's about 13.6 kilowatts there were batteries in the garage there are four batteries it turned out my utility only let me turn on two which was fine because it turned out I only needed two and the other two were just sitting there in backup mode and if I needed an emergency or if the other two would go out so what happens is in the morning sunlight hits the panels the first thing that happens that the electricity goes to power home needs and then the remaining electricity goes to power the batteries in the morning and then the remaining electricity goes back to the grid and is sold to the grid so for heating, air and heating and cooling I have electric heat pumps so they run on electricity heat pumps are great because they don't they use one fourth the energy as natural gas heaters or even electric resistance heaters because they don't create heat or destroy it they move heat so they move it from the outside so on the right is the outside unit where it extracts basically heat from the air and moves it inside to the inside unit and in each room there's one of these inside units on the left and there are no ducts that's why they're called ductless mini-split electric heat pump air heaters and air conditioners because there are no ducts there's pipes, small rubber pipes between the outside units and each inside unit that are filled with coolant in any way there's a heat so it's heat is exchanged between the outside and the inside when you need air conditioning you suck cold out of the air of course you can suck heat or cold out of the ground too or out of water where I live it's the most efficient is just out of the air but it uses as I mentioned one fourth the energy as a gas heater same with my water heater it's a heat pump water heater it extracts heat from the utility room that it sits in and then that heat is transferred to the water and water heats up just like any other water heater but it uses one fourth the energy so it's so efficient and then there are LED light bulbs for cooking I use an electric induction cooktop which most people don't like electric resistance stoves because it's hard to control the temperature they're not as good as gas but these are better than gas they boil water and half the time is gas you can control the heating it's even cooking throughout the pot you do need either iron or stainless steel base pots but those are not expensive at all and the nice thing is the stove doesn't even feel hot when you touch it even if you're boiling water because electrons excite the molecules in the pot itself in the base of the pot and the resistance creates the heat so the pot gets hot but it only transfers heat to the stove by conduction so it's a lot cooler than if you were actually heating the stove itself so those are nice just to summarize, there's three years of energy use over and I also have two electric cars they're over three years generated 120% of all my home and vehicle energy use I had no electric bill, no natural gas bill or no gasoline bill and I received $700 per year back from the community choice aggregation utility in California and also six other states there are these CCAs that will if you don't have your own solar they will procure 100% renewable electricity for you which is nice so that's if you're in a apartment complex and you have to pay an electricity bill you can't put solar on your roof then you can still opt in with this CCA to get 100% renewable electricity but if you have solar they actually pay you for that solar at the same rate that you would pay for at the time of the day so we have tiered rates so there's the cheapest time right now for where I live is between 11 p.m. and 7 a.m. so that's when I charge my cars but in peak time is between like three and nine p.m. and then there's another rate so if I generate electricity between three and nine p.m. they'll pay up to 28 cents per kilowatt hour and that's pretty good and it adds up over time so if I look at overall these numbers below show what it typically costs for a typical homeowner so the other thing I avoided I did not have to pay a gas hookup fee in my area that would have been about $6,000 so I avoided that I avoided gas pipes which also would have been another $5,000 or $6,000 I said I haven't paid no electric bill gas bill or vehicle fuel bill and these are the ranges of their costs so overall you'd expect if you have a new house to save at least $4,000 to $15,000 up front and $3,000 to $10,000 per year due to savings and they pay back time without subsidies about 10 years with subsidies about five years there are subsidies in the U.S. and in California for solar for batteries and even heat pump water heaters so with subsidies it's a five year payback time the solar panels are warrantied for 25 years there's really no reason anybody can't either change out their own all their appliances to become electric or change their vehicles why they would not benefit with regard to cars if somebody drives and the U.S. people drive a lot 15,000 miles per year for 15 years then they will save on the order of $20,000 in fuel costs due to the price of gasoline around here and that's a huge amount so that makes up any difference in the price of the car difference between electric and gasoline cars so it's really becoming this is happening worldwide it's becoming much more efficient to electrify everything San Francisco just passed a law this last week where there'll be no new natural gas in new buildings or new residential buildings as of January 1st and actually that's San Francisco is not the first city in California to do that we also have Menlo Park and Berkeley and I think a couple others have passed laws where there's no new natural gas in buildings so we need that we don't need natural gas in buildings we don't need anything except for electricity and a lot of electricity in new buildings can be generated with rooftop solar in fact, there's a law in California also at the beginning of this year where all new buildings have to be zero net energy so it pretty much requires solar to be on rooftops for that to happen I wanna show one benefit of this home system so on September 6th of this year was the hottest day of the year outside temperature, sorry about my Fahrenheit units but 106 degrees Fahrenheit inside was 77 because I set the temperature inside to a range and that's the upper limit of the range and so it's perfect temperature inside but on the right you can see the solar production which is the green the blue is the consumption of electricity well where it overlaps the green is the consumption of electricity in the house or the charging of the batteries and then after the sun goes down the blue is the battery production of electricity and then the red is grid electricity but if you see on the top right in small print it shows that during that day I produced 60 kilowatt hours and I consumed 45 kilowatt hours so on the order of 15 kilowatt hour difference more production than consumption but this is the day where there were blackouts throughout California and my point is if we go to 100% renewables and all the homes have heat pumps in them which are so much more efficient they hardly use any energy that's a solution to solving this problem the other reason there were blackouts in California was that well during the day there's a lot of solar growth and that's great for daytime production of electricity but wind growth in California has stalled but if we actually look at in fact there's no offshore wind but if we actually look at the offshore wind resource which is shown here this shows the hour of the day and then the average for July on the top and then there's January, October and April kind of the three on the bottom but July is in the summer when you need electricity from wind and one of the peaks is after the sun goes down so if we actually grow offshore wind in California which we expect to now that we have a new administration and offshore wind can become unleashed and if we grow that and continue to grow solar then we can capture that peak and demand that occurs after sunset in during the summer and that should help to avoid blackouts in the state so some people claim oh it's renewables that have caused blackouts but no it's not, it's not enough renewables we need more solar and more wind and particularly offshore wind and then also more storage and so that will solve the problem for any blackouts that are occurring and by the way it should be pointed out that well we have two nuclear reactors in California, Diablo Canyon and over the last two months one has been completely down and the other was down for about half the period one was scheduled means the other was unscheduled maintenance so those are not and those are shutting down completely in a few years both of them will be shut down completely but so they are also intermittent because of the down not only the scheduled maintenance but also unscheduled maintenance so it's not a question that we need more nuclear either because they're not reliable and also expensive, very expensive and of other impacts so the next issue can we transition the entire world to 100% clean renewable energy for all purposes and so we did roadmaps for 143 countries including Australia and the US and I'll just summarize the results and first I'll show you some results for all 143 countries put together so the end use power demand in 2016 of all these countries was 12.6 trillion watts or terawatts and end use power demand is what people actually use and then if we go to 2050 these projected that would go up to 20.3 terawatts in a business as usual or BAU case but if we electrify everything and provide that electricity with clean renewable wind, water and solar energy that goes down to 8.7 terawatts or 57% and these are five main reasons for this 21.7 percentage points but that reduction is due to the efficiency of battery electric vehicles and hydrogen fuel cell vehicles versus internal combustion engine vehicles for example, of all the gasoline put in a vehicle in a gasoline vehicle only 17 to 20% of it goes to move the car and the rest is waste heat whereas in a battery electric vehicle about 80 to 86% of the electricity that actually gets into the car goes to move the car and the rest is waste heat so you actually reduce your energy requirements your end use energy requirements by electrifying vehicles hydrogen fuel cell vehicles are only maybe 30% efficient when you account for all the efficiency losses but they're still more efficient than battery electric not as good as hydrogen fuel cell sorry not as good as batteries for passenger vehicles as I mentioned before as you get to big heavy transport then that equation shifts and those efficiencies change but overall if you average over everything 21.7% reduction 3.4% reduction of energy used by electrifying industry 13% due to the efficiency of heat pumps when you average over all energy sectors using heat pumps will reduce all energy 13% and then 12.1% of all energy worldwide is used to mine transport and refine fossil fuels in uranium so we would eliminate that in this wind water solar world and then we think we can squeeze 6.6% or so and use energy efficiency improvements and reductions of energy used beyond business as usual so that adds up to 57% so here's a diagram showing kind of a similar thing but the timeline of our proposed transition is 80% by 2030 and 100% by 2050 so if we don't do anything we go along the top line which takes us to 2050 and having a huge amount of huge power to it but then by electrifying we go down those five shades of colors down to the 100% line and that's what we need to provide and then I show the distribution of the wind solar and geothermal and hydroelectric especially so we need 8.7 terawatts so the proposed mix we have in the average over all countries each country has a different mix but this is an average of all countries it's 30.5% onshore wind 14.5% offshore wind 11% residential rooftop PV 14% commercial government rooftop PV 19% PV power plants 4% CSP power plants 1% geothermal 5.7% hydro and all of that exists in these roadmaps we didn't actually add any new hydro and then less than half a percent of tidal plus wave power so you might ask well how much land does that take and so this shows well tidal wave there's no new land offshore wind there's no new land rooftop PV there's no new land we don't have any new hydro so there's no new land geothermal is pretty small so it's all the land is utility PV plus CSP which is about 0.17% of the world's land and then onshore wind is about 0.48% but that's all spacing as I showed in the early photograph you have a lot of space between those wind turbines that you can use that land for multiple purposes including for putting photovoltaics utility scale PV on that land but even if you don't count that spacing the wind land is spacing area not footprint area even if you counted here it's 0.65% in the US it's about it's about 0.9% however in the US 1.3% of all the land right now is used for the fossil fuel industry for millions of miles of pipelines for 2.7 million active oil and gas wells and 2.3 million inactive ones for coal mines for storage facilities for gas stations the whole fossil fuel infrastructure takes more land than what we would need to power the entire US and indeed the world so we would reduce land requirements we believe with a clean renewable energy system well the next question is well can we keep the grid stable with just wind and water and solar so we took these 143 countries and we divided them into 24 world regions and did a grid stability analysis in each region and indeed found that we can keep the grid stable by just accounting for and counting for the intermittency of wind and solar every 30 seconds for three years in this case and also accounting for all the storage options I discussed previously and using demand response and assuming well interconnected grid and so this shows results for the United States for all three years on the top for zero day zero to day 1300 something 1400 something so and so we chose the blue is load the energy demand plus the changes in storage plus the losses from storage transmission distribution and shedding and the red is the electricity and heat generation before losses and if you look at the bottom graph that just shows a hundred day period where this exact same comparison where you can see every hour the supply is matching the demand exactly and we were able to match supply and demand everywhere including Australia including every region of the world we looked at and then you might ask well okay this is a perfectly interconnected grid well what happens well what happens if you discretize though we did Europe for example we found we can solve the problem there as well but then I thought okay let's look at each individual country let's say in Europe and let's say we tried to solve the problem for each independent country as if it's an island or a micro grid on its own and then we looked at the cost of energy so for example Norway the cost of energy per year this is all energy so this is electrifying everything electricity, transportation, buildings, industry it would be about 10.8 billion per year in 2050 for Norway alone if you did Denmark alone it's about 11 billion years per year if they're in isolation but you can do it you can solve we did Luxembourg and Gibraltar on their own is it as isolated micro grids and if they provide their own electricity without any interconnection to the rest of Europe they can you can keep the grid stable there but take this example the total between the two is 21.8 billion years per year now let's say we then combine those two countries and have well good interconnection between them the overall cost gets reduced by 21% to 17.3 billion because we need because one of the things you when you have wind and solar that are intermittent you often have to over build and you might need a lot of batteries too to when you don't have enough but when you interconnect two countries you diversify the resources more you have less overbuilding and less storage needed so you can reduce the cost and so we've done this for multiple combinations of countries in Europe and continuously find that it's cheaper to interconnect the more you interconnect the cheaper it is one more thing that we found that was interesting is the correlation between heating load in buildings in cold areas in cold countries in particular and wind energy that might not apply so much in Australia especially Northern Europe and Canada in the US in fact, in Russia this just shows that over one year the black lines on the top graph are the heat load which peaks in the winter times the beginning and the end of the year here and the wind output which also peaks the wind output also peaks in the winter time and then bottom is just the correlation between the wind power output and the heating load for buildings this is for the US and there's actually a pretty strong correlation between wind power availability and heat load so this indicates that the more you build out wind that's gonna help with your winter time heating demand if you have heat pumps so these are just some illustrations of what helps match power demand with supply and the grid both well interconnections in cold countries building wind energy out where there's a good correlation, et cetera there are other things as well at work okay you might ask what's the cost of energy if we electrify everything around the world so from all our 143 country road met plans and the grid integration studies we found that the world average cost of energy electricity if we electrify everything is nine cents a kilowatt hour but more important the capital cost 73 trillion dollars up front for the US the capital cost is 7.8 trillion Europe is about 6.2 trillion but those are the costs of our Green New Deal so the US Green New Deal that you've been hearing about is that would be the capital cost of transitioning everything you probably heard some numbers like it'll cost 90 trillion dollars these are what some people were claiming cost 90 trillion dollars for this Green New Deal but no it's only it's less than nine trillion Joe Biden who's the president elect now he has committed to spend two trillion dollars in four years on clean energy and if he actually applies that to real clean energy and not all of the above solutions which would include things like carbon capture and biofuels and nuclear if he avoids those and spends it on clean renewable energy he's really getting to about one quarter of the Green New Deal in four years which would be amazing so that's I really hope that he steers that's such funny if it actually comes through towards transitioning the infrastructure to just clean renewable energy because we can go a long way to actually solving the problem in a short period of time. Now let's look at these costs from just one other perspective it's the annual cost of energy in 2050 in a business as usual case worldwide the world would spend about 17.7 trillion dollars per year on energy now today it spends around the order of like 10 or 11 trillion dollars per year but the health costs will be about 30 trillion dollars per year as it is now and the climate cost would be on the order of 28 trillion dollars per year so that's a total of social cost or we call the social cost of energy of 76 trillion but because we reduce energy consumption 57% and the cost per unit energy goes down another 10% or so we reduce the energy cost if we go to windwater solar by 61.4% down to 6.8 trillion dollars per year we eliminate the health and climate costs so we eliminate the social cost of energy by 91% so it's only a benefit to transition to clean renewable energy we get rid of these horrendous health and climate costs and the energy costs go down because we're using a lot less energy because it's so much more efficient system and there's a benefit in terms of the cost per unit energy in fact right now new wind new onshore wind and new utility scale solar are the cheapest forms of electricity in the US by far per kilowatt hour they're on the order of half the cost of natural gas this is for the US alone the same thing windwater solar cost in the end would be about 770 billion dollars per year which is very similar to what the military budget is so this is a feasible cost to actually transition the United States and also the world and we have the same number we have numbers for Australia as well that show a very similar result you get this huge energy cost reduction due to both the reduction of energy consumption the resulting from the efficiency and the cost per unit energy and you eliminate health and climate costs and so it's really a no-brainer in terms of jobs we also create millions more jobs in the US it's about three million more long-term full-time jobs than lost worldwide it's about 28 million more long-term full-time jobs than lost and in Australia there are a lot of more jobs produced than are lost and these are permanent jobs not just temporary jobs and let me just skip this one this was for metropolitan areas so let me get to the policy so we'll just may start by just saying so our first study on transitioning to renewable energy was in 2009 in this Scientific American article where Mark Delucchi and I did a study looking at is it possible to just based on resources and looked a little bit at intermentancy but on materials to actually provide 100% of all energy worldwide for all purposes with just wind and water and solar and the answer was yes it's technically and economically possible even by 2030 it's technically possible but for social and political reasons it's more likely that it'll take longer to have a complete transition and so we then suggested well we should try at least 80% by 2030 and then get 100% no later than 2050 little did we know that this paper turned out to be the scientific basis for the Green New Deal which whose goal has been to go to 100% renewables for all energy in the US by 2030 although as we kept saying it's like it's probably unlikely we'll get everything by 2030 but at least it's a goal to shoot for but we do think we can get everything at least by 2050 if not sooner in certain sectors you could get by 2030 it's just not all energy now since then there are 61 countries that have committed to 100% renewable electricity now keep in mind electricity is not all energy it's about 21, sorry 20% of all end use energy but still it's a start most of these are smaller countries but it's important to have a goal and not to be outdone well there are actually 11 countries that are already near or above 100% renewable electricity most of these are actually above 100% or above so Iceland, Norway, Costa Rica, Paraguay, Uruguay Tajikistan, Albania, Scotland, Kenya, Bhutan, Nepal all except two are dominated by hydropower Scotland is mostly wind and well as of the end of 2019 it was 92% renewables and at the end of 2020 it'll be 100% renewable electricity in the annual average Kenya is mostly geothermal but also hydro and wind so it's really encouraging that there are example countries that are there even if it is with hydro because a lot of people say it just can't be done but this is just not true and obviously it can be done. In the US just to give you some background of what's been going on over the last at least five years there actually have been resolutions and laws proposed in the US Congress in 2015 there was a Senate resolution 632 for the US to transition to 100% clean renewable energy by 2050 and in 2017 a Senate bill and also a House bill in 2017 another House bill in 2019 another resolution and then the Green New Deal was proposed in 2019 in both the House and the Senate so they were the seventh and eighth proposed laws. Now ironically none of these laws or resolutions has even been voted on but they have spurred a movement. I should say that the very first one the 2015 one resolution 540 actually was based on our US roadmap we did roadmaps for all 50 states in the US and this really got attention to policymakers and was actually the platform of all three Democratic presidential candidates in 2016 and also the Democratic National Committee made it their platform but it says it said in the law in the proposed resolution it says whereas a Stanford study concludes the United States energy supply could be based entirely on renewable energy by the year 2050 you're using current technologies the policies of the United States should support a transition to near zero greenhouse gas emissions 100% clean renewable energy infrastructure modernization and green jobs, et cetera anyway that never got voted on so it can't be too happy but there are at the state level though a lot more has happened there are actually 14 states and territories that do have laws on the books now that require 100% of all their electricity not all energy but their electricity to be 100% renewables and including Rhode Island which is the most aggressive by 2030 Washington DC by 2032 Connecticut, Hawaii, California, New Mexico Washington state, New York, Puerto Rico Nevada, Maine, Wisconsin, Virginia and New Jersey so but we do need all energy sectors and that's really what the push needs to be focus needs to be now to look at you get through transportation buildings industry industry is probably gonna be the hardest there are 176 US cities and counties that have a laws or some kinds of commitments to 100% renewable electricity and some of them are all energy including many of the major cities in the US worldwide there are about 300 cities that have committed to this and there are several and there are also counties and regions like ACT as was just mentioned earlier is 100% renewable electricity so that would be in this kind of vein where not only a commitment but actually having reached it these cities haven't reached it yet there are about five in the US that have reached it some small towns now there are also about 260 companies to date that have committed to 100% renewables including eight out of the 10 biggest companies in the world Google, Microsoft, Apple, JPMorgan Chase Facebook, Amazon, Johnson & Johnson and Bank of America and so this is a start they're actually guiding they're actually pushing investment in wind and solar farms around the world these companies and so this is really important not only can individuals help in their own homes but businesses can help policy makers can help by passing aggressive renewable laws and the general public can help by trying to pick the right policy makers there are a lot of nonprofits that have committed to 100% renewables so in 2011 I helped co-found a nonprofit called the Solutions Project which then was really the goal was to take these energy plans we were developing and then engage the public and policy makers and combine not only science but business culture and community to because nobody just listens to scientists anymore especially me but they do listen to entertainers and they do listen to business people and so having a coalition of people together actually was more effective at getting lots of these laws passed so we created this movement effectively not only in the Solutions Project by getting a bunch of nonprofits, NGOs together there are at least 100 nonprofits now to form a network of nonprofits that all had the same goal of going to 100% renewables and as a result that they were able to push laws so for example the Sierra Club took our plans for the states and then went to all these cities and because they have thousands of people across the US who are on the ground in different states and they went to the cities and they were the ones the Sierra Club were the ones who really initiated all these laws in the cities to transition so but anyway there are at least 100 nonprofits helping out in this manner now the public is on board this was actually in 2017 a public opinion poll 26,000 people in 13 countries and what they found was that well 82% of people and average over all these countries want 100% renewable energy what's surprising is only 66% of people believed climate change was a global challenge so why do more people believe in renewable energy than in climate change well it's because many people say that renewables make countries more energy independent that they boost economic growth they create jobs they reduce their reliance on foreign energy so to speak and also in resiliency so people want to own their own power too so the nice thing is there are a lot of people who will believe in the solution even if they don't believe in the problem so as long as they're on board with the solution that's good now I want to talk so that's I just want to summarize here but I also didn't want to talk a little bit more for just for a minute about what's going on now since the election let me just give you the summary these plans we found that we can create 28 million more jobs and lost worldwide we'd require only 0.17% of the land for footprints and 0.48% for spacing avoid millions of air pollution deaths per year slow than reverse global warming we think we can keep the grid stable throughout the world with 100% renewables we reduce absolute energy costs by 60% and social costs by 90% so we think there's really no reason why we wouldn't want to transition entirely to clean renewable energy and here are some resources actually websites for the actual roadmaps and other stuff but I'll just mention that so we have this election and clearly Joe Biden has won and he'll be the next president of the United States which is hopefully most people are rejoicing around the world for that because well in terms of energies certainly the last administration was stalling offshore wind in particular in the U.S. but he was also promoting oil and gas and coal even though coal has dropped even under his administration under the Trump administration you know coal was like 48% or so of the electric power mix when he started or maybe it was 40% by then but actually 20 years ago it was like almost 60% now it's down to about 18% so you know coal is nose diving in the U.S. and it's being replaced mostly by renewables but also by some natural gas so there is still some growth of gas my concern with the new administration is mostly that he'll take up an all of the above policy he'll definitely be better than Trump in terms of energy policy going towards renewables but under the Obama administration the Obama administration was had an all of the above policy where they would put a lot of money into carbon capture into nuclear into biofuels but we have found over and over that these are not some of them don't work like carbon capture it doesn't decrease air pollution at all if you need more energy it actually increases air pollution I mean if you get your energy for the carbon capture equipment from fossil fuels it increases air pollution it doesn't decrease mining the carbon what do you do with it? right now it's only piped to oil fields to enhance oil recovery you hardly reduce as much carbon as claimed so it's always cheaper from a social cost and an energy cost point of view to just use money for a carbon capture and just replace the coal or the gas so this has been shown over and over again so if you just waste if we have a very we have a very short time to transition and if we waste money when I say short time we need 80% by 2030 if we waste money on something and we can't whereas we can deploy solar sometimes six months up to six months to a year some wind farms like a wind farm in China is being put up in six months to a year now too so that we can deploy wind and solar very rapidly and batteries as well but if we spend money on things that are just in development and don't work now even with nuclear we know traditional nuclear takes between 10 and 19 years between planning and operation so say 2035 for the next nuclear reactor if it's planned today that's just way way past where we need 80% of the solution so that's a waste of money we're emitting for 15 years while we're waiting for that nuclear reactor to be put up even small modular reactors they're trying to get money for that but even the most advanced won't even be ready they don't claim they'll be ready until about 2029 or 2030 but even that'll probably be pushed off but already the costs have increased substantially and so it's just we really need to focus keep our eye on the ball and focus on technologies we know work and so that's that's why I'd all urge you to just focus on clean renewable energy things that work and storage demand response efficiency and interconnecting with good transmission so those are the things I would focus on I can share more but I'm sure there'll be a lot of questions that'll bring up topics related to the new administration but so I'll stop there and open it up for questions thank you very much Mark perhaps if you could just stop sharing your screen now okay so there's a bunch of questions that have come in and I guess probably the number one in many people's eyes is what if the Republicans own the Senate? yeah so yeah that's a possibility so just to get it right on the same page the Senate right now is 50 to 48 in favor of the Republicans there are two seats in Georgia that are going up for a special election in January and if the Democrats win that they will even though it's 50-50 they will control the Senate because the tiebreaker is the vice president who's a Camel Harris and so that's a very important election but if they don't win the Senate then it's the Senate obviously not as good because if they do win the Senate then they can really pass really aggressive legislation otherwise Joe Biden as president can do a lot of stuff through executive order they'll still get more done than under the current administration offshore win will still go through because a lot of the stuff that's being stalled is through executive order right now through Trump and those will be reversed and a lot of the Senate even the Republicans are in favor of renewables to a large degree aside from Trump because you know nine out of ten India states in the U.S. are all red states or Republican held states and so they're making a lot of money from a lot of jobs and money and solar is growing rapidly in many Republican states so there is probably a big enough coalition even if the Republicans control the Senate to grow renewables although it'll definitely if the Democrats control it'll grow even faster but one more thing is a lot of what's going on right now is at the state level and it's really the states that need to implement these things and if the states states can do a lot on their own even without the federal government in fact that's how we got those 14 laws that I talked about those are all states doing things on their own and even without yeah without the federal government under the Trump administration so a lot can be done without even the federal government okay so that really means that it's somewhat similar to Australia where you could have a hostile aura impotent federal government but if the state governments are on side then these can go ahead right yeah that's true so but I worry that then the states that are deep red states you know they won't transition as fast unless the federal government steps in because they're not going to in their state legislatures they won't do much more even though they benefit from renewables they're not going to be as aggressive as many other states that are you know have more moderate or liberal leaning policy makers so yeah so I think definitely having the federal government will be on totally on board 100% on board will speed things up it's not a deal breaker definitely the president is the most important person by far in this transition right now so there's quite a few questions coming in so one question is how important is it do you think that the Australian government and the US government for that matter commits to net zero emissions or is it fairly empty if there aren't stepping stones along the way well I think it's always good to have a commitment and to even if you know and a timeline to get to that commitment so it really motivates people to get to you know work harder and even if that commitment can't be reached in like in a known short term it's still good to have a commitment to strive for something because without it then yeah everything's up in the air you don't even there's there's no incentive at all then to transition because it just you know you might find some people still sell gas if they can or coal if they can find a market for it so you first need a commitment then you need kind of laws to strengthen that commitment and get to the end point so I do think it's very important for the Australian government and the US government to have strong policies do you think the greenhouse gas emission implications of refrigerances is important or do you think there'll be sufficient control to make sure that they do not escape in large quantity in the atmosphere yeah well right now halogens are about nine percent of global greenhouse gas warming and so they're definitely important and but their emissions have slowed down so a lot of what's there that nine percent is a lot was emitted years and decades ago but there are still emissions of some certain gases that are haven't been banned yet so I think like everything else that's so of all the emissions worldwide for greenhouse gas emissions about seventy five percent are energy and then about twenty twenty five percent are non-energy like uh... halogens and then in terms of air pollution about ninety percent of all emissions are from energy and about ten percent are not energy but so you do need to control non-energy emissions as well so it's not only the halogens it's nitrous oxide for fertilizer from fertilizers it's methane from landfills and rice paddies and cattle and manure and is biomass burning as well so these all have to be controlled so we want parallel efforts to control the energy and the non-energy emissions so hydrogen for fuel cells to power aeroplanes and long distances transport and the like is obviously interesting and important um... how important do you think hydrogen will be for so called green steel um... this is particularly important to Australia because Australia is the world's number one iron ore exporter from the north-west which also happens to have the world's best solar and wind pretty much and as you could discuss that yeah sure yeah so there is this hydrogen plant I think it's in Sweden that sorry a steel plant that runs off hydrogen you can reduce the carbon emissions from steel I think it's like ninety eight point five percent or maybe ninety nine point percent something percent with the hydrogen process so yeah that was that's an additional application I didn't mention that hydrogen can be used in and I think it would be really useful because steel right now is a big source of CO2 not only from the energy use in steel production but also from the chemical reaction where CO2 is off-gassed so both Australia and the US have large areas of excellent direct normal insulation and so CSB concentrating solar power can obviously provide electricity although it hasn't made it into the market yet but what do you think the prospects are for CSP for direct integration with industry I think I mean in theory it's great the idea would be to have a CSP plant but you have to have the industrial facility coupled to it pretty close by so I think that's the disadvantage because I mean most industry is already located somewhere and you can't just put a CSP plant anywhere and you can't pipe high temperature heat very far because you have a big loss so you really need a CSP plant next to the industrial facility so I think there's probably more limited applications for that than then using the CSP just to produce electricity and maybe yeah well so it does work it's just that I think there are limited applications you need the industrial facility close by to the CSP in your 143 country analysis to what extent do the high-voltage DC and AC power lines extend are they long distance or are they relatively short distances and we assume between 1200 to 2000 kilometers for HVDC and yeah so we look at the costs of putting those up and also the energy losses through them but yeah so for HVDC it's beneficial over I think it's past 600 kilometers or so rather than you want HVDC lines below the AC lines HVAC lines but yeah so that'll be really helpful for interconnecting places with strong solar or wind resources with places that use those resources so you'll have to do it step by step yeah in Australia you'll have a lot of potential for HVDC because of the big distances and the big resources in different areas so in the United States it'll be very obvious to connect Texas for example with New York and California what are the technically straightforward what about the social issues right so that's unlikely to happen because well first of all Texas is its own grid and then East Coast then there's an Eastern grid and the Western grid and then a Texas grid but even the idea yeah the theory is because in the Great Plains you have a huge amount of wind for example the idea would be take that wind and wheel it to the East Coast however it's much better just to take the wind from offshore the East Coast and wheel it to New York City so it's much shorter distance the problem with transmission is getting it is not the cost even I mean it is expensive it's not that's not the major issue or the or the technical issue it's it's the getting the zoning there are a lot of barriers to zoning it to getting rights away and so you can if you have existing pathways that's probably best to piggyback on those existing pathways but it's probably not going to get a long distance transmission over you know half the US just because of the zoning problems and it'll take a long time what it's it's better to use or the options are the choices are use local production and more storage and short distance transmission or or production that's farther away and more transmission and less storage I think this local production and storage is going to win that battle just because it's um it's just so difficult to get transmission cited over such a large distance so with large amounts of local generation from rooftops perhaps coupled with local storage in car batteries does that significantly reduce the transmission and distribution losses oh yeah yeah that's the other benefit of rooftop solar is much less transmission distribution loss well more lots of us distribution loss well it is because if you're using it in your home there's virtually zero loss so that's the benefit and so again there's the trade-off is utility solar and transmission over short or long distance versus rooftop solar and no transition now utility solar is is actually cheaper than rooftop solar just because the economy is of scale now I should I say that when you have an individual residential rooftop but it turns out if you have a community let's say 10 homes that becomes cheaper than one home times 10 if you have like an industrial building that becomes even cheaper or a community so if you can install lots of solar on roofs simultaneously that becomes cheaper it starts approaching utility scale pv but utility scale pv is still cheaper it's just that it requires transmission and losses so it really depends on the location you're going to have a combination of both utility pv and residential rooftop pv and commercial and government so you'll definitely need a mix because you even if you've covered all the buildings let's say in Australia or the US that's not enough electricity to provide all the energy you need for everything so you do need other sort you need utility scale you need wind hydropower in Tasmania and yeah even geothermal so it's a mix is better do you see any raw material availability problems with wind solar batteries and the other components of 100 renewable solution well we've analyzed materials and one last time we did I mean there's about seven times more neodymium for example which is used in permanent magnets and wind turbine generators about seven times more than if you power the entire world alone with wind so there's plenty of neodymium for solar there are a lot of elements that are needed for specific cells but there's so many options of cells these days if one is short then you can use a different one lithium for batteries there's enough lithium for I think it was like 5 billion cars in the world there are close to a billion or more cars right now but hopefully we'll never get even close to 5 billion cars but so there are enough resources I think it's but we want to recycle as much as we can we want to conserve make things as efficient we want the goal is to eliminate as much as possible environmental damage and so that's which to that end like there is a mining company in Texas for example that they're building a mine a rare earth's mine that's going to be run on 100% renewable electricity so that's like a step forward in the mining industry and at the other end do you think this can be significant problems with demolishing and recycling wind and solar generators at the end of their life uh well I mean a lot of wind dread generators they will last 30 40 years actually ultimate pass which is the three California wind farms are the oldest in the world the farms are all from 1980 around and many of their turbines are still there so they just build bigger turbines next to the smaller ones so there will be of course you'll decommission turbines and they'll have to be scrapped and hopefully as many materials as possible will be recycled yeah but it's but you know the thing is we compare wind let's say to fossil fuels fossil fuels in the u.s there are 50 000 new oil and gas wells drilled every year and there are as I mentioned 1.7 million active oil and gas wells and 2.3 million inactive ones so you have to do that continuously forever 50 000 new ones every year where in addition to building the facilities and retiring the facilities so you have materials you just have a lot more mining and waste from the fossil fuel industry we go to wind yeah for every 30 years you have to or for 30 or 40 years you have to recycle a wind turbine or that's just so much less orders of magnitude less waste than all the cements they put in like all these oil wells these fracked gas wells for example they put cement casings in and then they fill them with cement afterwards when they're done and so there's a lot of waste resource going right there just in these cement casings I mean Pennsylvania alone has like close to a million fracked oil and gas wells and they put a bunch of cement to and then they still leak after there after they've been filled some of them do and so you know we're talking orders of magnitude greater waste in the current fossil fuel industry than what would ever happen in a clean renewable energy world so given that president elect Biden will assume office on the 20th of January what is and the COP is the next COP meeting is in November next year a year away what is your view of how the politics of climate change in renewables will go during say 2021 worldwide or in the U.S. U.S. and then worldwide I think well I think most people are on board with solving the problem even republicans you know a larger fraction of them are on board in solving the problem but also even if they don't believe in the problem they do believe as I mentioned in the solutions and renewable energy so I think you know it's just cheaper it's making money for a lot of people and creating jobs so hopefully it'll just it won't be a partisan issue that's my goal is like the next couple years that it won't be a partisan issue it'll just be naturally everybody want to do it because it's benefiting everybody it's just like a vaccine I mean everyone's a vaccine to work so I think before you know it'll be shifting more towards while republicans tend to like nuclear more you know or some other solution or cut carbon capture because it protects the fossil fuel industry so that's that's my biggest concern is they're going to try to you know push these what I call solutions that don't actually do anything helpful because but they'll claim that that's climate benefit benefiting climate and that's my concern about you know kind of giving credence to these all of policies that allow technologies that don't actually have much benefit or cause more pollution or or take forever to put up my concern is that they'll latch on to that and claim that's climate beneficial and it's not really worldwide I think the world is already you know kind of their mind is more set about the solutions although you know a lot of countries that have done have done a lot and then other countries haven't done so much so we have to really translate talk into action everywhere and so even countries that you know say they're for they really have to step up and start putting laws down to actually transition so I am hopeful that we can transition because the technologies are there the costs have come down not only for generation but storage electric vehicles appliances and demand responses starting to catch on and yeah there's just a lot going in the right direction but there's you know there is a lot of there are a lot of vested interests still there that will slow it down or try to you know divert the divert funding things like that do you think that the President Biden together with the current leadership of China and the European Union and Japan which have a large fraction of the world's economy in 2021 will decide that they need to seriously work together to put long-term solution in place yeah I'm sure they'll have meetings to that effect and hopefully it'll be more than just you know agreements without actually in actual laws we put in place in each country and targets being met we I mean we need it has to be aggressive as I mentioned 80 by 2030 that is a that's all sectors and all energy and also non-energy to avoid 1.5 degrees global warming we need 80 by 2030 and 100 before 2050 to get that we need a really aggressive action so you know the Paris climate accord was you know it's a step but it's not nearly so aggressive as we need to solve the problem so I think it's it really has to be incumbent upon all the leaders including President like Biden that we need a rapid transition we can only focus on technologies that we know work and can be deployed quickly I think that's a really key part of it and we have to transition not only electricity but all the other sectors transportation buildings industry so that it's just it's there are a few things that just need to be focused on and if we focus on these leaders focus on those things and really make aggressive efforts we can go a long way if they if they come up and we'll say we'll just try everything we'll do in all of the above policy we're going to go nowhere so focusing on California which is I think the world's 20th biggest economy if it was a country in its own right um what are California's climate goals and is there an appetite to accelerate what what they are yeah well California actually has a well has a lot to go to 100% renewable electricity by 2045 and 70% by 2030 but it's already out if you including hydro and wind and solar and geothermal it's already at 55% renewable electricity so I think it'll be at 100% I mean it'll be at 70% probably by 2026 2027 100% maybe by 2030 it does have the buildings law to get all new buildings have to be zeroed at energy but it has to retrofit existing buildings there's a lot bigger EV adoption well there is an executive order from governor brown who's no longer the governor but he did issue an executive order that there California has to be zero carbon I think it was by I don't know if it was 2050 so there is something in place but you know that's that was just a goal and as opposed to we need specific laws in place to get there so there is I mean calvert generally has really aggressive laws and and it is working pretty hard I actually think it will because I mean we're not putting in new gas we're taking out existing gas replacing them with solar batteries and vehicle growth as I mentioned is growing really fast so I think it will be an example for the world at least for the US you know within five years it'll something will be closer to 100% so there's been a lot of discussion of hydrogen um but as everyone knows it's not easy to handle hydrogen and do you think ammonia or some or some artificial hydrocarbon will be the main hydrogen vector um so I'm not a fan of ammonia because if it gets into the air it's an air pollutant in fact in the Los Angeles smog ammonium nitrate is the biggest visibility reducer in the entire Los Angeles basin the ammonia from fat cattle feedlots and chino for example they mix with nitrate from vehicle exhaust so any elite ammonia is an air pollutant so I don't I try to stay away from ammonia uh so hydrogen I think hydrogen can be you know if hydrogen burns the flame shoots straight up it's actually us in terms of like if you have a car that's hydrogen versus a car that's gasoline the car the gasoline car will explode the hydrogen car the flame will shoot straight up and everybody in the car will be saved so so it's actually a I think a safer fuel it does have it's more flammable but if there are you know it's not like the Hindenburg which everybody thinks about anymore which wasn't burned by hydrogen but by the by the actual blimp burning up catching on fire um so I'm not so concerned about the safety issues because you know we're talking about hydrogen aircraft and you know there's not so much of a concern I mean there's a concern but it's not it can be overcome with sufficient testing so in Australia there's a a large amount of discussion about Australia being a renewable energy superpower exporting hydrogen-based chemicals around the world and becoming the next Saudi Arabia so to speak what do you think the prospects are for significant transport of energy in the form of a hydrogen or an energy-rich monofil I mean transporting the hydrogen to somewhere else or using hydrogen for transport uh do you think transporting the hydrogen or energy-rich chemical to another place for Japan for example um I mean I I would guess it's probably more efficient to produce the hydrogen in Japan and then like I I was debated like if you have wind is it better to produce the hydrogen locally and then ship it to a city for vehicles to a filling station or to transmit the electricity and then produce the hydrogen at with an electrolyzer on site without having to transmit it I think you can do all sorts of analyses in fact there have been analyses done but in terms of simplicity I think it's transmitting the electricity is simpler and then producing hydrogen on site is better but you know there I haven't looked at every scenario so this scenario where the Australia would produce huge amounts of hydrogen and ship it it might be efficient but you'd have to I think you'd have to do an analysis to look at well is it better to do that produce the hydrogen in Japan itself for example because they have you know they have an abundance of offshore wind too and especially like yeah but if you use offshore if you just build a huge amount of offshore wind and whenever you have too much wind to use it to produce hydrogen that's a local source you don't need to ship it so I would my first inclination is that's probably better but I think you'd have to do an analysis to actually show one way or the other and there are places where you maybe can't produce it very well it's more expensive to producers so are there any apart from you know alleged visual impact of offshore wind are there any significant down sides of offshore wind well all wind turbines will slow the winds locally we have looked at that issue and if we power the whole world with about 40 wind you know the the wind speeds would be slowed by a negligible percent you know if you cover the entire world with wind like every wind turbine everywhere every over the ocean over land you can reduce the wind speeds 50% but you know we need about 2.3 million 5 megawatt turbines to power the world pretty much or 40% of the world maybe there's more maybe it's 2.5 million but you know that was a it was a small reduction of the wind speeds locally you do have a bigger reduction so sure you have a local impact but you also have a local impact of buildings skyscrapers will slow the winds like there's in china there's this thing called disappearing wind syndrome where you have meteorological stations down wind of these cities that expand and suddenly the winds go down so yeah things do affect the weather like winter winds so that would be whether it's good or bad it depends i mean if you're in a hurricane you'd rather have a bunch of wind turbines they're extracting energy so that's an idea where if you have big arrays of offshore wind turbines you can reduce severe storms and hurricane damage so that's a benefit but you know in texas there there is there's the great plains was the dust bowl area and so big winds would kick up lots of dust and so once these big wind farms in west texas came up then farmers liked it because it was reducing these dust events significantly but bad things i mean people do complain about bird deaths but i would argue that in winter winds do kill birds in the u.s it's about 500 to 600 or 700 thousand birds a year but you know communication towers kill 10 to 50 million birds in the u.s buildings are about a billion birds cats are about three billion birds a year so it's pretty small in comparison to other sources of bird deaths and fossil fuel energy itself is about 10 times more birds per kilowatt hour coal and gas due to the wind because of the devastation of the land and the habitat of the birds because of the air pollution and because of the buildings that the birds will run into so it's i think i think the most visible thing with wind is or that people can complain about is there is the bird deaths including raptors too this is another issue but again i think we need to look at everything in perspective and overall by transitioning we would reduce bird deaths we'd reduce wild life deaths we'd reduce seven million air pollution deaths to the humans per year so i think that counts for a lot so it was a final question are you optimistic pessimistic or somewhere in between for the next for say the 2020s to put us well on track to zero emissions now i'm i'm optimistic because we have the technologies costs are coming down people are on board most people are on board there are still people in the way but i think there's so much momentum and there's a big growth even during this pandemic while fossil fuel energy consumption and use dropped and building dropped construction renewables have actually stayed constant or grown and that's a positive step as well and you know records are being broken all the time and we have countries that are getting closer to fully renewable and regions and cities and so i'm optimistic and more because i know it can be done it's you know whether it will be done it's really depends on policy and individual actions but knowing it can be done is important because if you're skeptical that it might not be done not be possible technically or economically then that's i think a self-fulfilling prophecy and it won't happen and you'll head you'll head your bets and adjust in something else but if you believe in it then i think if people believe in it then they will invest in it and pass policies for more of it well thank you very much mark that has been a fantastic hour and a half and if you wouldn't mind just staying on the website alive i say goodbye to everybody so everybody thanks for joining us today and we recommend that you check out the energy change institutes website or subscribe to our newsletter for future updates don't forget that on the 3rd of December on Thursday at 12 o'clock the energy change institute will host energy update 2020 focusing on the world energy outlook 2020 from the international energy agency which seemed to have had a revolution in that they declared that solar PV was now the cheapest form of energy in history which of course those in the industry have known for quite a few years but the international energy agency has suddenly discovered this to be true so we hope we you can join us all then and i wish you all goodbye and have a pleasant afternoon thank you