 Let me welcome you here this evening to a great event. This is the finalists of the ANU Grand Challenges Scheme. My name's Margaret Harding. I'm the Deputy Vice-Chancellor for Research and Innovation here at ANU and I will be your emcee here this evening. Before we begin, let me first acknowledge and celebrate the first Australians on whose traditional lands we meet and pay my respects to the elders of the Nunawar people past and present. As I said, a really warm welcome to the ANU Research Community who are here this evening but also to our external guests and members of the Canberra community who have come along this evening. I hope to be entertained, inspired, enthused by some of the great research that is going on at the ANU. This scheme is a $50 million initiative which was part of the new strategic plan launched by the ANU Vice-Chancellor early last year. Within that, let me read through to you one of the premises or the strategies outlined in that was that we will invest over the course of the plan in five globally significant research challenges that deliver solutions to national priorities and ensure core disciplines and research strengths are ranked alongside the best in the world. It's a program and a scheme that has been run and coordinated in a manner different to the way we have funded previous projects in the university. In particular, the Vice-Chancellor is committed to ensure that as the national university we use our resources and invest in long term strategic programs high risk, high reward programs of research that are difficult to be funded externally but also ones that were really advanced knowledge, will draw on our strengths, will create and combine disciplines to come up with solutions to really grand problems or wicked problems in a manner that really draws on our strengths and delivers great benefits for the nation, for the Asia Pacific region, and puts ANU rightfully in its place alongside the best universities in the world. We have been really delighted with the response across the university many researchers participated in an initial video pitch I've got my numbers down here somewhere. We had about 37 initial videos of teams were presented, another 30 teams then submitted at the next stage of the proposals and then finally eight presented to a panel and this evening you're going to see the three finalists present as part of the judging selection of the first ANU Grand Challenge to be announced by the Vice Chancellor later this week. Let me warmly acknowledge and thank our selection panel members who are on the first and the second row here this evening. Again the process here was to deliberately involve external input into the selection of these Grand Challenges. So I'm pleased to acknowledge and thank very warmly my Deputy Chair Mick Cardewal, the Provost Chancellor of Innovation Graham Farqua and Joan Beaumont, distinguished emeritus professors at this university have brought great research expertise into the panel. Amy King, Westpac Fellow in the College of Asia and Pacific, Francesca McClain a current PhD student, one of the superstars of STEM and who has delivered I guess on our commitment to a very active involvement of our students in partnership with many of the key decisions across the university. Michelle Burke who is a member of the Vice Chancellor's External Industry Advisory Board Arun Abhay a very passionate advocate and supporter of the university via the College of Business and Economics Industry Advisory Board and Alan Ginjal who is an alumnus of the university has a distinguished track record and of in public policy and in government. So I would like to warmly acknowledge and thank particularly our external members for their time contributing to this important process. This afternoon to give you an idea of this the panel met with the three teams they gave us a brief overview of their projects and we had a Q&A with the panel. This evening we will give the final pictures and then tomorrow morning the panel will reconvene in terms of making final recommendations to the Vice Chancellor. In terms of the session this evening could I just advise you the session is being recorded so if you are not comfortable with that or please be aware of that for the Q&A session later this afternoon. So each of the teams have been invited to present a 20 minute pitch. This is to really give you an overview of what their grand challenge is, why they think it's really important the university should invest in their grand challenge and then we'll open the floor for 10 minutes Q&A from the floor and we'll have roving mics to actually assist you come up to questions. Please come up and interrogate the teams, ask them what you think, challenge them so to speak in terms of what their research is about or things that you would like to know more about is that's an important part of the process this evening. So without further ado let me invite the first team to the stage the first grand challenge is zero carbon energy for the Asia Pacific and the leadership team who are also presenting this evening include Ken Baldwin from the Energy Change Institute Kali Kachpal from the Research School of Engineering, Alex Skew the Managing Director of CWP Renewables, Luaylon Hughes from the Crawford School of Public Policy and Yun Liu from the Research School of Chemistry. Welcome to the ANU of Energy Change Institute's grand challenge, zero carbon energy for the Asia Pacific. I'm Ken Baldwin, I'm the Director of the Energy Change Institute and it's my pleasure this evening to introduce our grand challenge. The research that will underpin our grand challenge team aims to change the way that Australia does business with the world. In the coming decades Australia will need to transition from a largely carbon based resource and product exporting nation to a nation that utilises its abundant renewable energy sources to create new energy exports and new energy export products. In this goal we will have a focus on the Asia Pacific region for reasons that will be explained to subsequently and in this process we will also benefit the nation through changes to our economy through new research insights and we will transfer this to our leaders in the Asia Pacific region. Let me first start by introducing my team. We have Professor Karlie Kaczpol from the Research School of Engineering in the College of Engineering and Computer Science, Alex Hewitt Director of the Green Energy Company, CWP Renewables Luaylon Hughes from the Crawford School in the College of the Asia Pacific and Professor Yun Liu from the Research School of Chemistry in the College of Science. Now let me hand over to Luaylon Hughes to tell you about the motivation behind our grand challenge theme. Great, thanks Ken. As Ken said, my name is Luaylon Hughes, I'm an Associate Professor of Crawford School of Public Policy here at the Indian Union. I actually turned to you three years ago from the US and one of the big reasons that I decided to do that was because for me solving this problem, that is solving the problem of meeting energy demand from the Asia Pacific in the coming decades really holds the key to shifting the world to a low carbon trajectory into the future. You can see here that in the coming couple of decades the Asia Pacific region is going to make up fully two-thirds of the expected growth in energy demand globally. And that means that by 2035 the Asia Pacific, China and of course India, but also the Asian countries as well are really going to come to dominate the global energy picture. Now our view and the view of our grand challenge project is that this represents a tremendous opportunity for Australia. Many of you know that Australia is already an energy superpower. We export enormous amounts of coal and natural gas to the Asia Pacific region but our project is based on the idea that we have a different opportunity and that our opportunity is to become a zero carbon energy superpower by exporting low emissions electricity and low emissions based products to the Asia Pacific region. Now many of you read the newspapers or I guess we see it on the internet these days but you know front pages of the newspapers every second day there are discussions about Australia. The Disney market, the internet is like the whole group associated with managing those kind of political debates. To my mind it's really easy when you follow those kinds of debates to forget just how urgent it is to meet the challenge that we are describing to you today. What you can see here are a few different emissions pathways for the future and what the implications of global temperature increase. Now there's a lot of uncertainty associated with mapping out what the future might look like in terms of temperature increase because of carbon emissions but in general terms I think you can take these as pretty indicative of the different futures that we might face and there are a few different things that you can take away from a picture like this. The first is if you look at the orange line that if we keep doing what we're doing today that we're really going to enter into a world in which it will be extraordinarily difficult for both human and natural systems to adapt to the kind of temperature increase at that point. But it's also important to note the blue line here. This shows you that even if governments meet the commitments that they made during the multilateral agreement that was recently reached in Paris, that we're nevertheless going to enter into a really challenging physical environment in terms of the implied increases in global temperatures that includes obviously Australia and the Asia Pacific region. So you can see a couple of other pathways there and those pathways suggest that it's still possible for us to make the kinds of technical, economic, policy and social changes that are going to be required to shift us to a pathway, an emissions pathway, that give us a fighting chance to keep in global temperatures down in the region on the mean increase of 1.5 to 2 degrees Celsius. But in order to do that, the time to act is now because the other thing that you can see from this data is that the longer we wait the harder it gets to do that. Now the last one I'll make before passing things onto Alex is what it requires to do that. So the first thing that's required is expertise. We're going to need expertise in the physical sciences we're going to need expertise in engineering, we're going to need expertise in policy sciences and social sciences more broadly, economics, managing issues like the social sciences to operate and a whole host of different issues will be associated with making that change. The great thing is here at the ANU, and that's something I've certainly realized is coming back, back here, is that those are all resources that we have in abundance here. That expertise as well as tremendous expertise in the Asia Pacific and Indonesia, China, all the countries that will be recipient of these are exploring and talking about now. So with that what I'd like to do is pass the floor to Alex who's going to tell you a little bit with more detail about how we're going to go about helping Asia-Pacific meet its energy needs while ensuring a low emissions future for Australia and across the region. Thank you. CWP is a developer of large scale wind and solar projects we've developed and delivered about 3 billion dollars with projects over the last 10 years. Australia is the cheapest renewable energy generation in the Asia Pacific region. This area in north of the Bilber in western Australia is the best renewable energy resource in Australia. Upstanding solar, but also outstanding wind in terms of the way it blows the time of day. Completed solar. Our neighbours to the north do not have this abundance of renewable energy. So in order to help them with their energy needs, in particular clean energy needs, we need to export our cheap renewable energy. And there's two ways of doing this. The first is through an undersea cable an HVDC high voltage DC cable. And the second is to use our abundant renewable energy to extract hydrogen and to transport it in a similar way to RNG to be used to scale. And in order to do this we will look to draw on the expertise and the resources of the DCI Energy Change Institute and this university. And I should say there's three years of work and development and research and feasibility studying and various branches of research in order to deliver these mega projects. And they need scale. They need immense scale in order to work. If we could just have a quick look at this slide here. Many of you may have seen something similar. Australia's energy resources are abundant in coal and gas. We've been exporting over many years. Uranium. Of course we do have abundant renewable energy resources. More than we need. This is something that was prepared by the DCI This is just looking at solar radiation. It's a nice simple illustration. It's interesting the area dark green at the bottom of Tasmania. That's typical of the resource level over in northern Asia and North America Europe. The area up there in western Australia is over twice that. And if we look at that blue dot, a solar farm about that size would be enough to supply Australia's energy needs. That 50 gigawatts of solar. Green one is the area of a solar farm that could supply the world. So about two years ago we commenced looking at this project called an energy hub. A renewable energy hub to export clean energy from Australia up to Indonesia and beyond up to Singapore. Potentially beyond that. There's an area of land there which has been identified and secured at 14,000 square kilometers. 14 million hectares. We can accommodate stage one and stage two. Stage one of the project we envisioned we scoped up at six gigawatts of electricity which is four generated by wind and two from solar. The reason why the two worked together so well is there's a wonderful wind there that blows regularly and it gets down in the middle of the day when the solar resource picks up. Four gigawatts would be 1,200 turbines. Three gigawatts of solar would be 50 square kilometers of solar panels and the two together would be transported in an undersea cable 3,300 kilometers up to Java and onto Singapore. There's been great advancement in HVDC technology so the losses in that cable all that way from Australia up to Indonesia is only 100 percent. It's a very exciting project but there's a lot of work to be done. There's quite a lot of research not only on the technical side but on the socio-economic and political side. This is the first this will be the first intercontinental transfer of clean energy. The benefits obviously to our northern neighbors will be to help them with their electricity needs and their rapidly expanding economies and also in particular clean energy needs. Indonesia alone has a 22 percent target for 2025 that's currently at 7 percent. It has a lot of hope by reaching these targets in Paris through their indigenous resources. From Australia's perspective the export value alone will be around 90 billion dollars over the course of the project so it's about 1.5 billion grand. So great challenges, great project, very significant outcomes. It will be historic and I will hand it over to Kali. Thank you. Thanks very much Alex. So in order to pursue this grand challenge we will take a 4A approach. ANU, ACT, Australia and the Asia Pacific. So within ANU we will develop research underpinning an ANU microgrid that will help reduce the emissions from the ANU campus as well as managing the electricity demand for the ACT. We'll then transfer that expertise to our partners in Indonesia through the Australia Indonesia Centre. We'll also develop research that will underpin new export opportunities for Australia and help meet the growing energy demand of the Asia Pacific. So our research is divided into two main themes as Alex mentioned. The first is the Asian Supergrid. The Asian Supergrid is the largest and most advanced renewable project of its kind in the world. Connecting northern Australia with wind and solar projects up through Indonesia and Singapore. It will require world leading innovation in the generation and storage of electricity and in also managing the demand through pump hydro systems which could be located in northern Australia or in Indonesia. But not only on the technical side we will also need to consider the politics and the energy security of such a system. It will create new multilateral links between these countries of all need to consider the implications of that. It will also need research on the social license to operate and indigenous acceptance in Australia as well as acceptance in Indonesia. ANU is extremely well placed to contribute to this project through our expertise in renewable energy, through our expertise in grid analysis and control and because our deep expertise and involvement with the economics, policy, security and governance of the Asian Pacific. Our second major theme is renewable fuels and products and this means creating hydrogen for example from renewable energy which can then be used as a storage mechanism and then can be exported and there are a number of different ways that you could do that either directly exporting hydrogen or processing it into other alternative fuels first. The key issue here is that renewable fuels are currently too expensive and solving this challenge is going to take both technical and economic innovation. On the technical side we need to create new processes that can be much more efficient and much cheaper in order to reduce the cost of renewable energy fuels and one way to do this would be to connect our world record efficiency solar cells in an integrated system that can produce hydrogen that could be then used to create other synthetic fuels. On the economic side we need to create new pathways so that the cost of renewable fuels can be reduced through economies of scale and this approach has been extremely successful in solar energy where the creation of pathways has led to a reduction in the cost of solar electricity by a factor of 10 in the last decade. If we can do this we have an enormous opportunity because we can make renewable fuels commercially viable and that will open up massive export opportunities for Australia in order to help meet that growing energy demand of the Asia Pacific and replace our current fossil fuel exports. And now I'll pass over to talk about that. This grand challenging team is built based on the ANU Energy Change Institute so as you can see including all seven ANU colleges and ANU facility and service. So this team involves not only expertise from science and technology but also the shoulders of expertise from such as the quality of the Asia Pacific, quality of the laws that reflect the multi-disciplinary nature of our grand challenge. So the expertise in economics, Indonesia, China, Japan, India, indigenous studies sociological and legal governance policy and security. To complement the science, technology and energy expertise make our teams be ready for this challenge. So these teams also closely engage with the ACT government in the industry and we also collaborate with international companies in the industry and the government as well and to realize those in the ACT Australia and the Asia Pacific. Our team including 72 members from the ANU Energy Change Institute 25% of them are female and this reflect more or less the current university gender balance. We value a gender diversity in this team because women represent half the resources and half the potential in any society. So with the support of this grand challenge program, we will make gender equality a priority in employment. We will try to do many many things to improve the gender balance. For example, we will have a 50% of the female representation on the leading teams and selection committees to drive 50% of female appointment. We will also try to make the policies offer the career flexible employment to the women to help them overcome the early career, middle career barriers. We will do similar things for early career and middle career research as well and we have so far we have done very well and we will really attract the 50% of the early career, middle career research in this exciting area because this is a very great opportunity for them as well. So we will try to do similar things to be sure that their workforce can be heard and also we can have a team to provide the proper mentoring on their career development because their contribution is critical to this grand challenge and also critical to the future of Australia. Thank you. So just to summarize then our grand challenge will deliver a transformation of the way that Australia deals with the trading in the rest of the world and in the Asia Pacific. And over the next five or so years our aim is to deliver the following from our research programs. Firstly, a blueprint for an Asian super grid powered by Australian renewables. Secondly, the creation of an ANU micro grid, the knowledge and the expertise from which we will then transfer and adapt to the areas in the Asia Pacific where that is most appropriate. Thirdly, we will develop the technologies and the processes needed to create new embedded energy, low carbon export products and fuels. And fourthly, we will undertake a program of development for economic frameworks that enable these technologies to then transfer this zero carbon embedded energy into export products. And overarching this entire process will be the development policies that will enable zero carbon energy to decarbonise the economies of Australia, Japan, South Korea, Indonesia, China and India where we have particular expertise, but also other countries in the Asia Pacific region. So the end result of this will be a series of high risk, high reward outcomes, but on the way we will also achieve many targets and goals that will allow us to utilise the knowledge on the root to these very lofty outcomes. And in that regard we would like to invite you to join with us and to be a part of our grand challenge, zero carbon energy for the Asia Pacific. Thank you very much. Thank you. That's a great first presentation I think which sets the scene for the rest of the evening. Could I please invite the team to stand at the front of the auditorium and what we will have about 10 minutes now would really welcome open questions from the audience. If you'd like to ask a question could you please raise your hand and there are some roving mics and we'll bring them to you. If you could just identify your name and where you're from please. And the question is there's one here and there's one off the back of it. I'm Satis Anul. I'm a former employee of this university. I was advised to do the internal and U.S. work Chancellor. Anyway my question is it sounds very exciting everything about it and the extraordinary economy of what we can provide to Asia but how do you handle the existing massive infrastructure in the current fuel energy system of the Asia Pacific and have you thought about the financial challenges and how you can deliver this low cost zero carbon strategy to the Asia Pacific. Yes well I think this embraces a whole range of questions that we're willing to focus on and remembering that the ultimate goal is to deliver a blueprint that will enable us to handle. So there are as you say enormous geopolitical issues to engage with and this is an area in which the has enormous expertise in the College of the Asia Pacific in Crawford in particular in the areas that relate to national security and similar areas. Likewise on the economic side of things we have enormous expertise understanding what the pathways might be to develop these export industries. So these are not things that are existing in the knowledge base needed to create zero carbon energy for the Asia Pacific that's why we have a research program and the university has the expertise to do that and I think the key thing from Alex's presentation is a lot of work has gone into for example scoping the super grid from a commercial perspective but they see challenges barriers, opportunities on the way that they can't research and understand the depth and that's why they require the partnership with us to do that. So on the other point I think we have to think about the hydrogen side of the equation. Japan, South Korea, China and other countries have industry policy strategy to incorporate the idea of increasingly using hydrogen for example within their energy system. The key question when you think about it is what the competitiveness of Australian exports would be relative to that domestically produced products. That's really a research question that I'd answer. Another thing that I think would be a really concrete kind of research outcome associated with answering these questions will be a kind of analysis of the life cycle carbon issues associated with exports that incorporate production here as well as transport and use it within country relative to what might be being produced within Japan and its own country as well. Recognizing that many of the plans in those countries are not using low carbon energy resources in order to create carbon to fuel our fields of vehicle and such things. So I think that it kind of builds on a number of plans that already exist within the economy. So the real question is how competitive can we be and what are the carbon implications of participating in most supply chains. Thank you. I'm Gabrielle Bama here from the Australian National University. That's a really exciting proposal. I'm going to ask you a main question and I should declare a conflict of interest in competing them. I guess what people say about the proposals is that these are meant to be high risk proposals and so I'm interested to hear from you what are the high risk aspects of your proposal. Okay so that depends on which aspect you're looking at. I would say and Alex will now be commenting on this, that the high risk from the Asian super grid side of things is less of a technology risk although there are a lot of challenges there. It's more a risk from the socio-economic and geopolitical side of things. So let's bring this question as a sort of demand push versus demand pull versus technology push type of question. The technology push side of things, I think we can see our way forward. The demand pull side of things however really needs a lot of work and that's where we have expertise on the other side of things with the renewable fuels and products. There is a lot of work that needs to be done at the sort of fundamental science and technology end of things in the push supply phase but there's still also working in demand pull to create these techno-economic pathways to do exactly what the first question suggested which is understand what the drivers are in specific economies and governance. So the risk there I think is more of the technology end than at the demand we're driving in. So that's a very quick answer to a very complex question. My name is Wilton Trump. You're all important here at the end. I'm in engineering there. So when you talk about the real challenges associated with this, you focus on the competitiveness with locally produced hydrogen for example in places like Japan. From the way you despite this I believe the real challenge will be in finding the investment that you need in order to set this up at the scale that's required to work so in that space you're not actually competing with locally produced resources in other countries. What you're competing with are these different investment objectives of people like BHP or Real Tinto or Army or United Kingdom. So the question would be how would you be competitive in that process? That's a very good question. I guess our experience is you get great projects and the money follows. I don't want to be trippin' but we have done this a few times. The project size, for example is the state one of the super rooms, $14 billion. It's a lot of money but on the other hand LNG projects are $35 billion in outputs. Economics is very important but it is actually a matter of getting a product which is clean energy but at a Italian price into the markets over there that would underpin the feasibility of the super group project. The hydrogen one I think there's another, there's a few years there but eventually when we do get this crack and when it becomes viable for large scale we will see the hydrogen extraction coming from where we have achieved this power. So you've got to look at the regions in the world where one can produce the achieved this generation and in our view that's exactly where we're putting the wind solar resource for the super group in some ways is the beauty of it. We've actually got two journeys running in parallel and they may well cross over and furthermore in terms of where would the money ultimately come from. For example on the super group project it would be a consortium of equity where various investors, not only Australian but we would see Singapore, Indonesia, Asia. The types of investors you'd typically be signing a 500 million or 1 million dollar ticket and you would need maybe anywhere between 3 to 6 there would be the banks numerous banks of course, the ECA's the export credit agencies, our partners at the moment for this project the largest turbine supplier in the world which is best from Denmark, Prismium, the largest cable manufacturer in the world which is in Italy GE, Converters, GE Ostrom, Swire from Hong Kong doing the big shifts so there's a beauty about bringing in an international community of support here and suppliers because you also tap into the export credit agencies and of course ultimately you would have a risk insurance associated with a major project that has as for the hydrogen economics will determine project feasibility but projects are feasible and the economics are attractive, the money always follows. We have time for one more quick question and then I'll need to close down for this session. Oh sorry. Thank you, it's a really exciting project. This square kilometre is quite a lot and a thousand turbines is quite a lot and it's terribly exciting but if it was in my backyard I might be a bit worried and I'm wondering whether you've undertaken any consultation yet or thought about how you might undertake the consultation with the indigenous owners of that land or is that still for public? No, very good question. There were one of the first consultations that we did consult so we had numerous consultations with the Northern Martin people and they're very supportive. We've also consulted with the local shires and we hadn't gone into a broad public consultation just yet. I should say I was up there about two or three weeks ago to pick a helicopter over the site. We were now for seven and a half hours and we still didn't recover the site. It is enormous. The closest area where there is any inhabitation is the San Fai Roadhouse which is 70 kilometres away. It really is quite the note. But we've already engaged traditional owners there helping us with the apology work that's been done at the moment. Should we perhaps also say that the ANU has enormous expertise in these areas and we will be partnering with the existing on the ground capability with CWP and with Renewables Partners to understand the local issues, the issues of social licence to operate and engagement, the partnership in the project. And once you understand those issues you're much better able then to agree into agreements and contracts to push these areas forward. But the same thing also needs to happen at the other end in Indonesia and Singapore and other parts of Asia and we have enormous expertise in those areas as well. And indeed it's the geopolitical aspects of this entire project that really have a lot of interest for us from a research perspective because it might be that by becoming engaged deeply in this intercom activity through energy that we transform the relationship with our northern region and we multilateralise our energy prospects in a way that actually enhances security. So that again is a big research question for us. I'm aware there is interest in other questions but in view of the time I'm sorry I will close the session down here but of course you know the members of the team now please feel free to follow up with them individually on other specific questions but please join with me in thanking the first person.