 Okay, good afternoon everybody and welcome to the ANU Energy Change Institute's public forum which will be discussing the technology investment roadmap this afternoon and we've called this digging deeper into the technology investment roadmap and we'll be looking at the recently released first low emissions technology statement which you can see that has a series of important priorities and recommendations and we'll be discussing this in more detail in a minute but let me just start off the proceedings by introducing myself. My name is Professor Ken Baldwin I'm the director of the Energy Change Institute here at the Australian National University and I'd like to begin by acknowledging the traditional owners on whose lands we meet in my case the Ngunnawal people and would like to pay my respects to their elders past and present. Please note that this is a public forum and that indeed media are present and I'll outline the running order of the proceeding shortly and in the meantime I'd like to ask you to think of questions that you can ask later in the in the proceedings which you can do by writing your question in the Q&A window on the bottom of your screen. You can adjust your window settings to use your name or you can ask a question anonymously. We'll see if we can get through all the questions today but if we do run out of time we welcome your questions via email until Monday and we will endeavour to follow all of them up. So let me just very quickly introduce the panel. I'll introduce them in more detail as we proceed with the presentations just to let you know that we'll be starting the proceedings by our keynote talk presented by Australia's chief scientist Dr Alan Finkel and this will be followed by some perspectives presented by our discussion panel which includes Dr Patrick Hartley, leader of CSRO's hydrogen industry mission, Dr Liz Ratnam, a future engineering research leader fellow in the ANU College of Engineering and Computer Science, Associate Professor Lowellan Hughes from the ANU Crawford School of Public Policy and Anna Scarbeck, CEO of Climate Works Australia. So Dr Finkel will give his presentation about the roadmap for about half an hour and each of the panelists will then speak for five minutes before we move to Q&A from the audience. Just before we begin I'd like to flag that this will be the first of two ANU webinars about the Technology Investment Roadmap. The second will be on Monday the 12th October at 5.30pm where the ANU Climate Change Institute will look at some of the climate specific aspects of the roadmap. So this includes things like carbon capture and use as an emerging technology and in particular the soils science aspects of the roadmap. We'll put a link in the chat about that so you have a direct link to attend that meeting on Monday as well. So it's now my pleasure to introduce today's keynote speaker Dr Alan Finkel. Dr Finkel commenced as Australia's Chief Scientist now I guess Alan five years ago almost and as Australia's eighth Chief Scientist he was also prior to his appointment the President of ATSEE the Australian Academy of Technology and Engineering and for eight years was Chancellor of Monash University. Since taking on the role of Chief Scientist back in January 2020 Dr Finkel was part of sorry was appointed in January 2020 as a chair of the expert advisory panel for CSIRO's report on climate and disaster resilience and in February 2020 he was appointed as chair of the Technology Investment Roadmap Ministerial Reference Group. He's also led the development of the 2019 National Hydrogen Strategy which was adopted in November 2019 with I believe a complete adoption of all the key elements. He was also the person who led the National Research Infrastructure Roadmap in 2016, the 2017 review into the National Electricity Market and the 2018 STEM Industry Partnership Forum report. So clearly no stranger to talking about things technology. I'd like to now welcome Dr Alan Finkel to present the keynote presentation this afternoon. Alan. Thank you Ken for those introductory words much appreciated. It's been a strange year and actually a lot of my work this year has been to do with COVID-19 with the response earlier in the year for intensive care ventilators and now contact tracing and outbreak management all of which can benefit from science and also the engineering method. Ken I'm going to share my screen is that the plan? I'll just go ahead. Okay so can you see the screen pivoting to the future? Yes that looks good. Great so I'm going to take this opportunity to tell you about the low emissions technology statement which is an element of the overarching technology roadmap that the government has been focusing on and introduced recently. So I think I can put it to you that Australia has done a journey and the direction of its journey is changing in recent years into a sunnier future. There's truly been a lot of activity. Of course if you go back quite a number of years we've had the renewable energy target which was pivotal in terms of setting us on a road to a cleaner electricity supply although there's still a long way to go. We had the national energy and productivity plan which I'll just call the efficiency plan. I'm showing you these little roadmarks along the highway to the future. The climate solutions fund which is the emissions reduction fund as well. There's a critical mineral strategy which builds our capacity to one day build batteries and motors and other critical elements of a low emissions future. The review that I did in 2017 of the electricity market that Ken mentioned was actually quite important for two reasons. One is it made sure that our system had the connection requirements correct so that large-scale wind and solar could connect to the grid right out storms and be a team player and it also put in the requirement for the integrated system plan that AEMO has put out twice now. The integrated system plan which will does enable us and will enable us to ship electrons north and south east and west and also open up the renewable energy zones. As Ken mentioned we had the national hydrogen strategy adopted last year by every state and territory. It really should be called the national clean hydrogen strategy because hydrogen made with non-clean methods. The hydrogen itself of course is always clean but hydrogen made from non-clean methods has been around for a long time but the future focus is all on clean hydrogen. What we're going to talk about today is the low emissions technology statement which allows me to finish the sentence in the title The Australia's on a journey to a low emissions future. Long way to go but the journey has begun. So I'm going to talk today specifically about the low emissions technology statement. Now it's important to understand that there are two ways that reviews can be done for government. Something like the electricity review that I did in 2017. That was done as an independent review where we developed our recommendations and effectively tossed them back over the fence to government for government to decide whether they would accept or reject the recommendations and it's quite well known 49 out of 50 were accepted and most of those have already been acted upon. But this review is more like the national hydrogen strategy whether the low emissions technology statement is actually owned by government but it benefited from deep and well connected advice from an advisory panel that was advising minister Angus Taylor in the development of this. So it's his it's the government's report so if you look at it and I hope that you have and if you haven't then I hope that you will you'll see that there are no recommendations in there. What there are are statements of government actions in many cases funded actions so it's quite different. It goes out and it's already got the support of government. So as I said they were advised by a panel called the ministerial reference panel that I chaired. I had six invited members. I won't go through one by one their names but you can see them clearly there. Covering areas of industrial logistics supply, research capability, clean investment, the use of hydrogen pipelines and policy. But going forward the minister has decided that the panel which was intended as a one-time panel that it should effectively morph into a long-term panel. It'll get a new name. It's flagged in the in the statement the technology investment advisory council and we're bringing in three ex officio members. David Parker the chair of the clean energy regulator. Well it's really the chair who happens to be for example of arena Justin Punch but it's an ex officio position so it's always the chair of arena and the chair of the Green Bank the clean energy finance corporation. So the existing seven members myself and the other six are continuing in this permanent advisory council with three additional people being brought in in an ex officio capacity and I am remaining as the chair. We went into this development of our advice to the minister with some principles in mind and I think these are important to articulate. They were with us from the beginning they've been with us throughout and they will endure into the ongoing work of the technology investment advisory council. The first the report was not about climate change. We all accept the science of climate change is absolutely proven it's not in dispute and the language of government has changed as of effectively in my mind January this year there's no argument the prime minister the energy minister are basically accepting that we have to do our bit to responsibly respond to the implications the very serious implications of climate change. That means of course that the world must reduce emissions and Australia has to be part of that effort to reduce emissions as quickly as is practically possible. And the third principle is that it's not just about reducing emissions we have to do so while maintaining our prosperity. We want to have our cake and eat it too if you like. Usually for a government report there's a clearly articulated vision statement in this report. The vision statement is that we look forward to a prosperous Australia recognised as a global low emissions technology leader in other words we want economic prosperity and we want to lower emissions and have a leadership role in doing that. There are below the vision strategic intents that are intended to help deliver that vision. There are four key ones we want lower household living expenses because all Australians should benefit from abundant clean and very importantly low cost energy and that's one of the the fruits of solar and wind electricity at large scale. We recognise the importance of an ongoing research effort in order to be able to deliver these important outcomes and so one of our strategic intents is to set up a research infrastructure that will attract and retain the best minds in particular in low emissions research. We want to see Australia be very competitive internationally by leveraging on our comparative advantages in particular our low cost and abundant solar and wind and to some extent hydroelectric renewable energy and of course the government is very focused on preserving and creating jobs so we need to capture the opportunities that will deliver on those jobs going forward. When we started and actually before I was involved the Department of Energy working with the CSIRO and Arena developed a list of about 140 technologies which we had to categorise and we've ended up categorising those technologies into four big groups. The first is what we call the priority low emissions technologies. They're so important in our opinion that the government just needs to invest in order to bring these forward as quickly as possible so they are cost effective low emissions solutions for the country. The second is what we call emerging and enabling technologies so they could be enabling technologies such as aspects of the operation of the national electricity market that enable the low emissions, the priority low emissions technologies to operate effectively or they could be new technologies that are getting close to being at the point where government and industry should be piling on and investing in them but they're not quite there yet but a lot of serious potential and those are the ones that Arena and the CFC and the CR will look at supporting. There are other technologies that we recognise as having what we've called transformative potential but they're just not ready yet for the kind of attention that a commonwealth government would want to deliver and the fourth is not the continuum it's a step away from the priority emerging and watching brief technologies it's just to acknowledge there are mature technologies that the government is not planning to invest in and of course the mature fossil fuel technologies but also the we're saying that at this stage solar and wind and hydroelectricity are not in the case of solar and wind at the end of their journey but the volume and the traffic in solar and wind in Australia and globally is such that private industry without ongoing support is already effectively in the money and able to deliver ongoing improvements in those technologies without the specific government investment and those mature technologies solar and wind in particular are key in the way that they support the priority low emissions technologies that I'll talk about soon. So I mentioned that we had 140 and we had to make selections what do we have in mind when we selected those priority technologies and I want to focus on the priority technologies from now on well there were four filters and the first was that we only wanted to have the commonwealth government giving its attention to technologies that have large abatement potential that can seriously reduce carbon dioxide or let me expand it to say greenhouse gas emissions in Australia and in our exported products so large abatement potential is key they also have to have large economic impact there's got to be something that can be delivered for their abatement potential but also for their contribution to the prosperity of Australia. Ideally their technologies that are not just brought in from overseas but to the extent that they're brought in from overseas we also can add to them and build on our comparative advantages so that we have a competitive position and finally they've got to be technologies where it actually makes a difference if the government gives them some attention or not. So what are those five priority technologies well the first is clean hydrogen as described in the national hydrogen strategy but through the low emissions technology strategy the government is going to give them even more attention and funding to the development of a variety of clean hydrogen pathways strategies for example there was funding announced I think 50 million dollars for a for the commencement of a hydrogen hub in the strategy was identified that to get the threshold in demand to justify building production at a level that will lower the costs we pretty much have to do things in an aggregated form through hubs. The second is looking at how batteries and pumped high row and solar thermal can contribute the storage capability that will enable us to bring more solar and wind into the electricity system as quickly as possible. The third is actually two things but it's really we call it one because it's zero emissions metals but specifically we're looking at zero emissions aluminium and zero emissions steel. Now these are not easy to do but we think that the impact is huge the abatement potential is enormous and with government investment working with industry and investors we believe that these can be developed for the long-term benefit of Australia and Australians. Now it doesn't matter how well we do with the first three and other low emissions technologies there's always going to be some sectors of our economy that are producing emissions and so there's a need at the end of the day as we go through the coming years and decades there's going to be a need to be able to effectively mop up what we can't eliminate and there are two ways to do that one is geosequestration and specifically carbon capture and storage and the other is biosequestration and there are different ways of doing that you can be above ground or below ground we felt that there's a lot of opportunity for below ground storage of carbon that's absorbing carbon dioxide out of the air and turning it into organic matter of long duration in the soil but to do that effectively needs an investment from government to develop low-cost measurement techniques because unless you can measure it you don't know that it's really there unless you can do that measurement inexpensively it's just not practical for farmers to invest in. Now with each of these and I won't go through every single one of them there's an economic stretch goal so for example for hydrogen through a careful process of investigating the market opportunities we've identified that if hydrogen can be produced for less than two dollars per kilogram less than two dollars Australian per kilogram then it starts to become competitive with the emissions incumbent clean hydrogen two dollars a kilogram can easily substitute for petrol and diesel for transport whether it's small cars large cars trains or ships and when I'm talking about hydrogen I'm also talking about hydrogen derivatives such as ammonia which could be and a lot of people are thinking this the clean fuel for the international maritime fleet the ships that plow the waters between the continents so there's a economic stretch goal for all of those five priority technologies or the six if you split out solar aluminium steel where we think that the well we know that the low emissions technology that we're supporting will be cost competitive with the high emissions incumbent and effectively make the high emissions incumbent obsolete because economically rational actors will choose the inexpensive low emission new contender the government is willing to spend money to make this happen but it absolutely expects that the industry and investors will pile in if they're given the right signals and based on experience with arena and the cefc in the past the government is hoping that it's its investment of money and signals will catalyze between three and five dollars in investment from the private sector per dollar of government investment and and the minister has already declared that the government is committed to 18 billion dollars of ongoing investment over the years this decade if that brings in co-investment at the three to five dollars per dollar rate you're talking up to a hundred billion dollars of investment into low emissions technologies by the government and private investors this decade there might be more this is a fabulous starting position and part of that 18 billion dollars is a commitment of around one and a half billion dollars for arena for the next 10 years so it's a it's a shot in the arm it's life for arena because its funding was about to run out so that's really exciting to see that. I won't go through the details but the government has declared four areas that it will monitor its own performance and the performance of investment community so investment incentive framework would include investment into research and development all the way through to pre-commercialization or early stage commercial deployment legislative and regulatory reforms will identify where there are barriers to adoption of hydrogen and other new low emissions technologies institutions and governance is referring to working with the clean energy agencies such as arena and ceo c to ensure that they've got the remit to invest in a spectrum of low emissions technologies and also to require that they report on a regular more regular basis more frequent basis to government on their progress in developing these low emissions technologies and the monitoring transparency and impact evaluation column at the right there is touching on the fact that there's an intention to produce a large technology statement update every year and that will involve monitoring how things are progressing and adapting our policy circumstances to optimize the pathway forward from each year onwards now a lot of people have asked me about investment certainty a lot of people said alan investors are upset but there's no investment certainty i'll show you investment certainty that's a picture of the main building of the bank of england that's where investors get certainty if you want certainty is investor you invest in a bank what it's investors in in technology or industry transport or whatever are not looking for certainty but they are looking for clarity and i believe that we're giving that to them so we can't the government can't give certainty to investors as i said that's the responsibility of the bank but what we can do is give policy direction the investment community knows now that the government will be investing of of the order of two billion dollars a year into low emissions technologies going forward there's awareness that there'll be an annual review and that's a good thing because we need to refine policy going forward but it's very clear in the low emissions technology statement that there's no intention of right angle turns or u-turns we're talking about fine-tuning what we believe is existing good policy so that it captures the advancements that occur year by year and also the government is signaling and providing policy direction through where it's investing r&d dollars and the early commercialization support i i think i i could say that the issue of investment certainty is a myth that needs to be dispelled a few other myth buster type things so yes we've asked oh my gosh you know you've got priority technologies there for your picking winner and i personally don't have a problem with picking winners but a lot of people do but in fact this is not picking winner what we have here is a portfolio of five or six key technologies which is spreading the risk and that's what any sensible big company would do in its r&d portfolio the key commonality is that this portfolio is focused on technologies that will reduce atmospheric emissions the outcome that we're pursuing here is not a technology outcome ultimately the outcome that we're pursuing here is lowering emissions into the atmosphere i'm constantly frequently asked you know why are we putting out a statement about gas and the role of gas going to the future well this statement's not about gas if people actually sit down and read it gas basically doesn't get a mention this is about using batteries and pumped hydro and thermal storage to support more and more solar and wind electricity into the grid and into off-grid applications as quickly as possible it's about developing a capacity to produce zero emissions steel it's about developing a clean hydrogen industry and i will note the in parentheses you're right that is a gas but i don't think they had that in mind when they were asking me about gas there's concern that there isn't an overarching target but there are sub-targets so we have the stretch goals for the five key priority technologies and so they give us our near-term goals which are driving us down the pathways to a low emissions future and if we do it well as i've said before it's written here will achieve cost parity so that the new low emissions technology will actually be adopted on mass because they will be out competing the high emissions technology the incumbents and finally there's concern that ccs is mentioned but if you read it it's and look at the funding behind it it's a it's a the funding is a small element it's about 50 million dollars out of the roughly two billion dollars that has been committed and it's not addressing coal-fired electricity anything's possible but the intention here is to ensure that we have the capability the resources and the skills on hand to use ccs where it stands for mopping up residuals and we're not alone if you look at the United Nations IPCC report they talk about the need for ccs and ccus in order to reach net zero 2050 or actually they're talking about reaching net zero in the second half of the century the international energy agency which is really has the membership of most of the countries in the world also talks about the importance of ccs because there will always be emissions from hard to bait sectors that have to be sequestered either through biosequestration or through geo sequestration so to wrap up let's go back to that roadway into the sunny future we've got the signposts there of things that have already been done and collectively they're starting to become significant there's a long way to go and the government recognizes that and when i first heard that the government was doing this i was very pleased in february the minister announced that the government is committed to producing a whole of economy low emission strategy for the COP26 meeting of the United Nations IPCC in Glasgow which was going to be this year of course it is now being postponed to next year and so that's a significant watch this space strategy that will be the next very major announcement on our journey into the low emissions future so ken that's it thank you and i'll stop sharing my screen wonderful Alan thank you very much for taking us for that little drive along the road into the future and for the excellent signposting along the way that's always useful so as we did earlier with the initial technology investment roadmap discussion paper we have a panel of experts to present their perspectives this time we have always the same panel as before not quite we have one addition that's a little on hues and our panel will now provide some commentary on the technology investment roadmap low emissions technology priorities first of all we have Dr Patrick Hartley Patrick is the leader of CSIRO's hydrogen industry mission he's responsible for developing the strategy the structure the operating model and the partnerships that will underpin a major new research initiative which is proposed for launch in mid 2020 which we already heard about haven't we Patrick and this will drive research development and demonstration projects aimed at scouting up Australia's domestic and export hydrogen industries so over to you Patrick thanks ken and and thanks also Alan it's a great pleasure to follow you once again it seemed to spend quite a few talks doing that but that's that's that's very good a tough act to follow as always so yes as ken mentioned i'm leading our hydrogen industry mission at the CSIRO and that obviously has a very strong focus on one of the priorities from the low emission technology statement hydrogen and yeah so i'll talk about hydrogen in a moment but yeah ken has really asked me to outline some high level reflections on the low emission technology statement now that we we have it in hand and in doing that i should first disclose that CSIRO really made a big contribution to the development of the of the low emission technology statement in a number of ways and that from my perspective in particular included all the hydrogen cost modeling which informed the H2 under two stretch goal and yeah basically we see that that stretch goal as a reflection on the strategy on the statement i guess is as broadly consistent with where we see hydrogen the hydrogen cost trajectory going and it's particularly consistent i guess with our earlier work which we presented in the in the national hydrogen roadmap in 2018 where we saw a progression towards around about $2.50 for over the next decade for hydrogen cost and so $2 versus $2.50 is a is a stretch goal and i think it's a realistic stretch goal because it really we know from that study and such good studies that the applications for hydrogen really do still to come online i've brought a range of those applications come online as that cost gets to that gets to that level so so given as i said given given my role as leading the hydrogen industry mission it should be no surprise that i certainly see clean hydrogen as a technology development opportunity for Australia however i will turn briefly to the overall package of priority challenges the other yeah the priority opportunities and we certainly see in CSRO we would certainly see them as we would certainly see them as as potentially important and worthy of support from a technology investment perspective and in fact we do have active research efforts across CSRO in in virtually all of them and that includes supporting new industries to transform raw mineral commodities into higher value products using low emissions approaches and activities such as value adding products using new technologies of working on CCS electricity systems modeling and grid integration technologies all of which are really contributing new ideas new technology to that to that goal of reducing emissions technology which is of course what this statement is about however certainly would note that the intent that this list of technologies is you know from the statement is not intended to be static so really support the intention of ongoing review which is of course a commitment that's made in the low emissions technology statement to review that list regularly and this makes absolute sense since one thing one thing we know in science from the science world is that game-changing technologies can appear at very short notice from left field so we do need to remain flexible enough to embrace them when they do and so that ongoing review and refresh of the statement will be very important as as things move forward. Returning to hydrogen the roadmap speaks of the hydrogen export export opportunity of course and that is also something of a focus for our technology development in CSIRO particularly from the perspective of using ammonia as a clean hydrogen carrier for hydrogen export but also in the many other technologies that we're that we're developing in the hydrogen space be there and hydrogen production technologies hydrogen processing technologies and of course the work that we do outside the technology areas be they in in things like environmental impacts and social lessons to operate issues so as noted in the let's and by many others export is not the only the only game in town we're increasingly of the opinion that building domestic markets for hydrogen will be a very important stepping stone to that large-scale export opportunity particularly since we need to really move to scale up the production and we're going to need domestic markets to to enable that and so on that topic I'd really like to note that a domestic clean hydrogen industry can actually act as a real enabler of many of the other priority technology priorities such as the use of hydrogen to displace fossil fuels from steelmaking for instance and and potentially is using hydrogen as a as an energy storage and grid balancing grid low grid balancing technology opportunity and I can tell you from the international perspective yesterday I flew on virtual wings to Qatar to discuss amongst a small group of experts from around the world the development development of their hydrogen strategy and basically everything we've seen in our national hydrogen strategy and in our low emissions technology statement is very consistent with the analysis that was presented at that discussion so I think I think we can take comfort that we're not seeing we're not inventing this on our own it's it's very much a shared view and with that I'll hand it back to you Ken. True thank you very much Patrick it's now my pleasure to introduce our second panelist Dr Liz Ratnam. Liz is part of the A&E College of Engineering and Computer Science where she holds a future engineering research leader fellowship and she joined the faculty there in 2018 her research interests are in the development of new paradigms to control distribution networks with a focus on creating a resilient carbon neutral power grid. Over to you Liz. Many thanks Ken and I think I'm off mute now and good afternoon or just give me a moment while I set this up and many thanks for the warm welcome and introduction. Today I'd like to discuss electricity in the context of the low emissions technology statement and let me okay and so in the context of the roadmap there's three key points I'd like to focus on today one is ways we might evolve the roadmap into the future two is opportunities with regards to playing to our strengths and three is ways that we might build new industries supporting growth opportunities job opportunities okay so now let's look at ways we might evolve the roadmap first let's take a look at the language for the stretch goal for energy storage specifically electricity from storage for firming under $100 per megawatt hour this would enable firmed wind and solar are pricing at or below today's average wholesale electricity price. Now let's look at the slide to the right courtesy of Mark Williamson executive general manager of the clean energy regulator so if we look at the trends of renewable capacity delivered over the period from 2016 to 2020 and we see that rooftop solar which is shown in yellow is growing much faster than utility scale solar which is shown in orange and we know that firming technologies that is energy storage are needed close to the generation store source for example rooftop solar that's residential battery storage for example or community energy storage specifically we need the distributed storage to back the rooftop solar or co-located storage to back the utility scale solar or wind otherwise we might need some investments to expand the poles and wires that might be needed to to move the energy from the solar to the the storage which in which case it could drive up our electricity prices so we want to co-locate the the generation with the the energy storage as much as possible. Okay so in terms of looking ahead in ways that we might evolve the roadmap we might want to consider the development of control and automation technology for supporting the deployment of energy storage for firmed wind and wind and solar specifically control and automation technology is the brains behind how we operate the energy storage to firm wind and solar. In more detail control and automation technology uses sensors that provide data to inform decisions on how much storage should be dispatched at any point in time in order to keep the lights on providing a secure and reliable power supply so under the banner of control and automation technology let's consider the technologies outlined below here we've got smart meters which are our sensors which are inputs to our controller or our brain we have energy storage solar pv wind turbines smart appliances inverters demand management systems which we can all consider as actuators that is the the thing that the controller gives decisions to for example to turn on or turn off and so the the controller is is the brains behind all of these technologies that enable us to keep our lights on and so energy management systems are one form of this control and automation technology but these alone did not keep the lights on across the whole entire grid so now let me touch on additional opportunities that we might want to consider in the context of our strengths so the enabling technology of control and automation is used in high-tech systems around the globe for example aeroplanes autonomous cars manufacturing processes and most importantly the control room where operators look at the state of the electricity grid and make decisions every day in order to keep our lights on while operating and maintaining the poles and wires so in terms of playing to our strengths might I be a bit cheeky here and say that we have two Australian universities that are ranked number 13 and number 18 in the world respectively in this field of control and automation and so now looking ahead at ways to build on industries might I suggest in that context that we might consider things like having funding schemes for multiple horizons supporting different levels of technology readiness and that we support startups with grants for technology transfer from universities where we have this expertise and also the third thing I'd like to put out there as a something to potentially consider is looking at developing a pipeline of graduates with the skills and expertise needed to grow the industries and businesses in this space okay so I think thank you and that's my pitch for control and automation technology great thank you very much Liz for pointing out something that maybe needs attention in the lead up to the second low emissions technology statement we now move on to Dr Llewellyn Hughes Llewellyn is an associate professor in the A&U Crawford School of Public Policy and he's also the Associate Dean for Research in the College of the Asian and Pacific at A&U. He focuses on the regulation of natural resource markets and the political economy of climate change. Dr Hughes joined the A&U in 2014 prior to that he was at the Elliott School of International Affairs at George Washington University. He received his PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and holds a master's degree from the Graduate School of Law and Politics at the University of Tokyo. So over to you Llewellyn. Thanks Ken and thanks also to the speakers. Really terrific to be part of this and to hear everyone's views on the you know what I think is pretty exciting that is the development of technology a low carbon technology road map for Australia. I know there are a huge number of issues to discuss here you know around the relationship between the road map and deployment targets for Australia, its role within Australia's broad decarbonisation mission and others I think are touching on those issues. So what I wanted to do was touch on a couple of different issues that I found really interesting and engaging with the road map. The first of those has been mentioned briefly by both Liz and Patrick and that's about the the global component of the the technology road map. You know as I as I was reading it you know it really struck me that international strategy Australia's place within these technology markets is really core to the strategy that has been developed. The strategic intent noted at the outset of the document is in part for Australia to be internationally competitive in order to as it says secure continued prosperity for Australia in a low emissions global economy. The road map says that the government's going to enter into international partnerships to collaborate on priority technologies and indeed we may see this beginning to happen with the joint Australian and German Feasibility Study which has been proposed to look at trade and investment between Australia and Germany. If you look at the stages between early technology development through to deployment stage three notes that you know Australia needs to gain an understanding of its technological needs but also its competitive advantages and stage four says that priority technologies should be identified according to our competitive advantage. Really interestingly you know the the technology statement also mentions Australia's experience in the solar photovoltaic market where it's been you know played an extraordinarily important role in technology development but many of the manufacturing benefits associated with that technology development you know are actually core components of some of our leading module manufacturers globally located in China. So it's really interesting and I wanted to highlight the the importance of that. You know one of the one of the kind of difficult issues here is that for these early stage technologies that are in tradeable sectors when the government might choose where to invest if those international markets are going to be particularly important in driving demand because as the roadmap says Australia's market itself is not big enough to play a key role in demand pool to you know push costs down then we're really going to need to have a very good sense of what's happening in those markets. Let's take the example of Japan where I do quite a lot of work. Part of the reason Alan forgive me if I'm wrong that Australia developed the hydrogen road map is because Japan itself did and said that that was a direction it was going to go for you know a variety of reasons associated with its loss of nuclear for example and you know if you look at other areas for example in ammonia as we've mentioned which has talked about as a potential future area for investment you know Japan's looking at you know burning green ammonia in its thermal coal plants up to 20% actually the fuel load in order to lower emissions from its fuel sector there's quite a bit going on there and it's incumbent on us that if we're going to be relying on those kinds of decisions being made in those markets to understand how they're progressing in the in the medium term as well as the long term if you look at Japan's fuel cell strategy for example they've got a target of selling 200 000 fuel cell vehicles by 2025 and 800 000 by 2030 now today there are 3 000 of them on the road and at the end of 2019 there were 112 hydrogen refuelling stations across Japan so really there I think they're really struggling to try and hit the kinds of targets that we're saying are informing our decisions about which key technologies to invest in and so I think in addition to thinking about our own capabilities we also really have to have a good understanding of what market demand is going to look like as a function of other road maps and other countries industry policy and industry strategy they're developing if we're going to want to want to be able to get this right given the way things have been put together the the second point I wanted to briefly touch on was the issue of governance so when I look at the roadmap it looks to me as a version of what we might call you know mission innovation you know the basic idea is rather than supporting entrepreneurialism through general R&D tax rebates for example that the government sets a broad direction which is associated with a social goal and then supports innovation in that direction here obviously that's about decarbonisation and then the question becomes how we're going to track the performance of those public investments over time and the roadmap makes some very very important remarks about those governance issues moving forward and particularly issues around monitoring around transparency and around impact evaluation you can see that other countries go about this quite differently so Japan has standing committees which sit within departments and are made up of expert committees with both public and private membership and they continue to analyse on an ongoing basis performance within a particular technology space the UK set up the energy technologies institute as a public private partnership beginning in 2007 which is actually sitting in university but it had a budgetary appropriation for about 50 million pounds a year and presented a different kind of model for that monitoring and evaluation exercise Germany has got the expert commission on energy for the future monitoring processes it's called at least in English that supports the German federal government and actually Andreas Nischer who we know in Australia and the ANU plays a key role in that it supports the department and it also is supported by the research community to do the leg work around impact evaluation as well so it's very heartening for me to see that monitoring impact evaluation and transparency as a core part of its roadmap because obviously really important for issues like regulatory capture the part that's missing and we're looking forward to I think for 2021 is what that impact evaluation component is going to look like because we do have a structure for funding which is centred on the existing funding bodies we have in Australia arena and CEFC we've got annual statements being put by the minister to parliament to to help track how things are going over time we've got strategic statements being released by an advisory council which Alan mentioned a moment ago but what the roadmap tells us is in time for the 2021 statement we'll have an understanding of what that robust impact evaluation component is going to look like from any other country it looks like you need to do some institution building that's not something you can do with a few people but you really need to have a fairly substantial amount of governance and work behind that assessment of international markets and domestic technology developments over time so that that's a key thing to I think watch for moving forward and thank you for that thank you very much Lauren for that perspective on both governance and the need to keep ahead of the the curve in technology by looking at the demand in our consumer partners in international trade now is the opportunity to hear from Anna Scarbeck Anna is CEO of Climate Works Australia which is an entity which lives within the Monash Sustainable Development Institute and the aim there is to bridge the gap between research and climate action and accelerate the transition to net zero emissions in Australia as well as in the region and and I've note that Anna is also the non-executive director of the Clean Energy Finance Corporation so she has a clear role to play in this roadmap process and was a founding director from 2012 to 2017 so over to you Anna. Thanks very much Ken and yes I was on the CFC board for its first five years and so I'll focus my remarks particularly on how investment programs can help boost the deployment perspective that Llewellyn mentioned and particularly the need for demand side focus in investment and in policy so certainly the overarching comments about the Low Emissions Technology Statement is that it's directionally correct and it's important that it's complemented by demand focus investment procurement commitments and policy support so this can be achieved by the mechanisms already mentioned in the paper so Alan Finkel mentioned the government's commitment to produce a long-term strategy in the lead up to next year's Paris Agreement and that can be a place for additional policy commitments and contributions by the Australian government and also the way that the investment is deployed can be focused more accurately on the demand creation side Llewellyn mentioned the push-pull and I want to come back to that a lot of the discussion in the in the tech investment roadmap paper the Low Emissions Technology Statement is on the what you'd call the push side so focusing on the supply of the technology and the costs of developing the technology and putting it making it available for use but we know that deployment or the pull side of pulling it into the market is what can also help bring costs down so it's the multiple use multiple production runs compared competition for acquiring the demand and therefore supply and demand so push and pull coming together is where we've seen greatest success certainly saw that during my term on the CFC and reverse auctions are a very effective investment program approach that we've seen mostly applied in relation to electricity generation such as the large-scale solar round during my term on the CFC board when that when they partnered with arena and over the course of 18 months stimulated an investment round for 10 large-scale solar farm and the cost per megawatt halved in that time because of the competitive pressure and the opportunity for multiple consortia to bid for multiple successful winning opportunities to deploy not just a single asset at a time and we're seeing that approach again deployed with hydrogen the recent round with arena and CFC which was oversubscribed so that led me to a second point which is about the scale and pace needs increasing and I based those remarks on climate works as research into Australia's pathways to net zero emissions and that indeed being the commitment of the Paris Agreement our research shows Australia has multiple pathways to achieve that but we are not at Australia as an economy is not yet tracking its emissions to be in line with a net zero emissions trajectory and the technology is available to do so but the scale and pace of its deployment need increasing so this will need deployment not only of the technologies prioritised in the low emissions technology statement but also of the technologies noted in that paper as mature and as emerging and indeed the government recognizes that in its document and certainly acknowledges that demand can be catalyzed through activities such as offtake agreements procurement incentivizing the uptake through arena or CFC so I'm interested in increasing the focus on that that we will need uptake of all the technologies named in the paper not just the four that have been prioritized so indeed we've looked at deployment goals as a as a guide I note that the government's paper acknowledges that the government's preference is to not mandate any deployment goals or will mandate the use at a certain volume of any of these technologies given that position we can work in the meantime with the investment that's available and hopefully investment that's increased in future years and leveraging private investment using CFC and arena and also working with the states so there's an opportunity through the Commonwealth state deals there's been one MOU signed with New South Wales and the Commonwealth there's an opportunity for other states to partner with the Commonwealth also to partner with the CFC and arena directly and use the investment that they can deploy through their own budget programs and CFC and arena to create the effect of demand signals and procurement or offtakes so being more sophisticated with what might be a traditional grant round what's considered on the push side as a subsidy often what the private sector is seeking is in fact a risk sharing so an offtake agreement is indeed that it's a contract that removes some of the risk of the demand being being there another way of doing that is contracts for difference where if we take hydrogen there's the cost of the electrolyser but there's also the cost of the electricity that's used to produce the hydrogen through that technology equipment and when we when we think about a push investment program which this statement has largely focused on carrying it with a pool investment program that can create the user arrangements the demand side also with a way that can help share some risk we're certainly seeing that that's what's considered more attractive for private investment to be deployed at scale and given the urgency of the emissions reduction task globally it's the at scale response that we need and so our our climate works response which is on our website to the paper looks at how to catalyse a supply chain scale response such as those large-scale solar rounds that I discussed or the or the hydrogen rounds recently crafting using the reverse auction concept and looking at it even in relation to hubs there was the name for there was the reference of one regional hydrogen hub in the paper whereas there's sort of a competitive round of multiple hubs can catalyse a supply chain response where you'll get a larger likelihood of more bidders more consortia and you start to embed local investment in often what's considered the soft time of term sheets between those parties agreed risk sharing between the consortia established sales force established channels to market all that stuff actually takes investment and what a well-designed goal oriented investment around focused on demand can do at supply chain level is offer enough demand as the offtaker if it's government being the buyer or if it's CFC and arena in a risk sharing sort of contract approach offer enough demand that you get a supply chain scale response so multiple consortia and then once they've done it once cut the first cookie as the chair of the CFC used to say in my time it's much easier for additional private sector players to replicate and for those initial winners to repeat without necessarily needing to subsidy round the next time around so I'm certainly looking for what comes next from this statement there's a lot that can be built on but it's urgent that that building be done and that we've got this next year where there'll be the long-term strategy and another opportunity for another statement and I would look to see a lot more commitment on demand side and hopefully a commitment on scale and that scale not just on demand side so the procurement and offtake but also scale even in this early stage investment round so obviously it's COVID times and there are large stimulus budgets being developed around the world Australia is lagging in its share of clean technology investment as a percentage of COVID stimulus investment competitors in in Europe are spending between 20 to 30 to 50% of their stimulus investments so far on clean technology green recovery measures in Australian dollars in the UK it was about 16 billion or 32 percent of their COVID stimulus budget in France it was about 50 billion Australian and it was about 34 percent of their budget Germany also 50 billion which was about 20 percent of their COVID budget so there's a real scale question if Australia wants to be an international leader as indeed was the vision expressed in the paper and I certainly support that vision and Australia's potential to play that leadership role and I hope that the step up can be made so that Australia can harness that potential and also reduce our collective risk of remaining a higher missions country might leave it there for the discussion Ken. Tariq thank you very much Anna so yes now let's start the the discussion and I notice Alan's been taking lots of notes so you may wish to respond to some of these comments but maybe just to start off with Alan it's clear I think from a number of the speakers here that although we're talking about a technology investment road map which is clearly you know focused on science and engineering aspects that that social and human science is also play a role in this it plays a role in understanding you know the human behaviour of demand the geopolitics of the global scene and also the development of market mechanisms that will help move this transition along rapidly and allow these technologies to hit the ground running so just perhaps a view Alan on the role of of these other disciplines in helping the technology road map hit the ground running it's a very difficult question Ken there's no doubt that building the demand that Anna is talking about requires everybody to play a role it's actually frustrating when people do surveys and they ask people they are interested in reducing their emissions to profiles and the answer is always yes but when you actually when the rubber hits the road and it's a question of how much are they prepared to add to their electricity bill or to their expenditures through a tax very quickly they don't want to be part of it and how we can come up with systems that provides sufficient reward to consumers for actually going a little bit further themselves because that demand that we're talking about is the totality of millions of consumers it's not just one big company that big company's got customers and a lot of their customers are companies who have other customers so in some countries the psychology of this like in Denmark is really well advanced in Australia we've got a long way to go the government's got a difficult pathway to navigate where it's got to show leadership in these low emissions approaches but it's also got to bring everybody along beyond just talk to actually being willing to commit and currently the approach will be approached embodied in the low emissions technology statement is to win people as participants by taking the economic pain out of it and you can do that by subsidizing from general revenue which is done for example in the climate solutions fund and the ERF or by investing to co-invest with developers to drive those new technologies down a cost pathway that they become very very attractive very very attractive and some of them will get there quite quickly we're very optimistic about hydrogen reaching the point of being competitive with diesel and petrol for trucking and trains and shipping and in terms of building demand which is going a bit off your question one of the areas that's been coming up a lot recently is using ammonia for shipping as the fuel of choice going forward for the whole ultimately for the whole of international merchant fleet I actually think that large applications like that will probably provide the demand will drive the cost down that will make it much more practical to bring people along your question was really can we or should we be investing in the research the sociological research the human research that will help to advance them well of course we have to but researchers like your colleagues have to come up with the right applications that will attract the interest of the funding mechanisms mechanisms we've got so we've got in this area we've got arena and CFC which we don't have in non-energy areas but most of the social values type of research is funded by the ARC or the universities themselves and that's always on the basis of investigator driven or investigator initiated research applications of a very high caliber so it's important it's not the focus of what the low emissions technology statement is doing its statement is to provide benefits its goal is to provide benefits to consumers by lowering the cost of energy electricity and substitutes for gas so that they want to participate in this the alternative approaches at this stage in this country I think you're going to have to be driven by smart researchers putting forward the right grant applications going out and showing to government and others that you can make a difference if you understand those social values good thanks Alan and a question now about how the if you like the hierarchy of technologies gets evolved over time so you mentioned that you know you've got this group of mature technologies and this includes wind and solar which are being heavily invested in by industry at the moment but in some sense that sends a bit of a signal that solar and wind are kind of done whereas we know that actually that's not the case so maybe the previous generation of solar and wind are done but this is a constantly changing landscape and just to give you an example the the current generation of solar cells which now dominate the international market were in fact developed by Australians by Andrew Blake is at ANU and Martin Green at UNSW and their colleagues but that was 30 years ago so so that was very way down the technology pipeline when that first happened but now it dominates and the next generation of solar cells are being looked at now things like perovskites, tandem solar cells and the like and indeed this is going to be even more important because as the cost of the panels the modules themselves are driven down it'll be the balance of plant that actually dominates the cost element so any improvement in efficiency is going to make solar even cheaper and again this feeds into hydrogen we've done work at the ANU where we looked at the main cost drivers to achieve $2 a kilo in hydrogen and they basically boil down to the cost of electrolyzers but also the cost of renewable energy so how do we then build into this system the ability to leapfrog certain technologies up into the priority list such as next generation solar from the lower echelons of the hierarchy so it's really important not to see the government identifying priorities as in any way saying the other things don't count I think that the logic here is if you can invest in a handful of priorities you've got a sufficiently small number that your money can make a difference and that was the fourth filter that we had that a government investment will help to make a difference but everybody else benefits because there's a move towards low emissions technologies there's a psychology of it and there's the cohort of or actually I don't know the interactions between them so green steel green zero emissions aluminium deeply depends on the cost of electricity it's the biggest single thing if you can get you need to use renewable electricity it's got to be really really cheap but when we're saying it's mature two things first of all perovskites and new ways of achieving photovoltaic or solar conversion they're still being funded through ARC through university funding through CSIRO funding and through arena funding so it's not as if they're being switched off the second thing is because they are mature technologies industry is very well motivated to be even more competitive so if you can build a plant that can take a couple of dollars per megawatt hour off your amortized cost of producing electricity you'll do it and it's a variety of things it's not just the efficiency of the cells it's the packing density there's a Australian company called Maverick that does this prefabricated packaging of cells where they're concertinaed and they go out in the field and they just roll them out and they're actually placed really close to each other they're cheap to deploy they're using the land area more effectively the cable distances are shorter and they're motivated because there's a commercial return and taking the cost out of their deployment so mature doesn't mean old fuddy-duddy it just means it's at a different stage of its evolution and a stage to be well respected and i think there's massive opportunities for improvement as you said there's a lot of investment billions and billions of dollars going into solar and wind in this country and a lot of smarts are going in not necessarily at large scale to the panels themselves but to the deployment technologies we missed as the well was saying i think we we missed the opportunity to capitalize on the income of being the manufacturers and the royalty income for the inventions from Andrew and from Martin most of them are used royalty free around the world capturing it is really really hard but the government is continuing to invest through arena CFC and all those other ones it's not as if the only dollars will ever be spent on those five priorities they're just the lead for government attention very good thank you and so now turn to the audience for questions and we've got a couple of questions around the the reduction in emissions that might be expected to occur from these five priorities a couple of the people in the audience have mentioned that the 250 megatons per annum the reduction that this might create is is a very large amount it's about half in fact of the current emissions in Australia so they're wanting to know how this was calculated and indeed how realistic this might be just looking at the technologies that are being considered here so there's been a lot of work that's been done by the department and through consultancies and it was just impossible to get it all finished and it's been wrapped up over the next few weeks and so that information will become public and put on websites but it's the it's the combination of you know if you're investing in solar and wind to make hydrogen and ammonia for export and by the way that's 2040 it's not a 2030 target so it's a 20 year target not a close one you you are actually lowering your costs for solar and wind you've got the storage to bring more solar and wind into the electricity grid and to space the existing fossil fuel incumbents so we'll be taking a lot of emissions out of the electricity grid we'll be investing a lot into green steel which will be starting to come on board around that time green aluminium will be starting to come on board around that time and green hydrogen and derivatives which have export potential as well and so we're looking at in a sense what the reduction through not exporting what would have been a high emissions export and also the biosecrestration potential of soil organic carbon as well as above ground biosecrestration so there is backing for all of that but keep in mind it's a 20 year period it wouldn't be feasible in a 10 year period but we do think it is feasible in a 20 year period. Does the the panel have any comment to make on the on the emissions side of the technology statement no no this stage okay let's move on to a couple other questions then question from John Sotavam. John's asking about the the actual goals of these priority areas and he asks a very interesting question so what happens if private sector investment isn't forthcoming for one of the five priorities what happens then in the roadmap process does that mean that government will still invest in that priority in the future or will it be taken off the priority vest? Well it would certainly put at risk the continued investment by government that's for sure because the main reason that private sector wouldn't be investing is that the technology is not evolving as well as people thought. As I said in my talk it's a it's a portfolio and look if one of the five is not working out at all and it's taken off and over successive years through the annual low emissions technology statements which are like milestone markers on the roadmap going forward new technologies are brought in so be it. You know no one is saying this is the only way forward we actually use the word adaptive it's an adaptive approach we are committed through that annual review that is the methodology will be developed over the next year not over the next weeks we haven't worked it out yet but we're committed to having a robust evaluation process and if it's clear that one of those technologies is just not going to make it or it's not going to make it in Australia it might make it overseas then I would assume that slowly we would back out of that and move into something else I can't tell you the answer Ken but it's not casting concrete what we are committed to or what we've advised the government the government is committed to is not to do rapid policy right angle turns or u-turns it will be an evolving portfolio I think there's a good chance those five will continue for the long term at this stage we see them as very very worthwhile but anything is possible and it just might be that international competition make something that is otherwise really really an important technology completely impractical for Australia I hope not that you know there's many reasons why things might not work out you have to take a bit of a chance thank you for that so we now might move on to a question from David McEwen so David's touching on this issue of hydrogen demand and in particular looking at the domestic side of things I think Patrick talked to this point as well earlier so there are proposals to introduce hydrogen into the natural gas network 10% initially but then there's a big jump from there to 100% so I guess the question if I can summarize it from David is what is the view of the panel in injecting hydrogen into the gas network versus simply switching to electrification or pure hydrogen alternatives at source I guess that means two or so electric vehicles and the like so that's open to the to the whole panel and I don't know Patrick whether you have a view on the tension between those two elements but I'm happy to hear the panel's views as well as Alan's absolutely and I I would say it's not a tension it's actually an opportunity I think and that's that's where the thinking is really going in this space now I think there's no there's no one right answer I think the opportunity for hydrogen to play a role in in many of the value chains that it can potentially play will will will always be balanced with where electricity can play a role I mean Alan spoke about the electric planet in one of his recent talks and and I think that's absolutely right electrify everything you can and then look at look at where where hydrogen you know can play can add value to that in certain applications where electric electricity may not be may not be suitable there's no doubt in you know we're going to need combustion and heat for a long time in both an industry and in domestic applications so I think looking at hydrogen in the application is entirely appropriate but equally well there may well be a much larger role for electrification to to reduce that demand so it's really just about balancing what makes sense Ken should I jump in on that sure so I certainly agree with everything that Patrick said I'd add two things one is that a 10 target actually is a phenomenal opportunity to build up experience on producing hydrogen 10 if 10 of our reticulated gas in suburbs and cities was hydrogen we would need about a gigawatt worth of electrolyzers which is three or four times the annual global production at the moment so it would be an enormous movement along the learning curve towards developing skills in safety and deployment and reducing costs and it could be done with virtually no impact on the price of the gas to the end users so it's a valuable thing to do in terms of the roadmap building up the demand that Anna was talking about the other thing is it's it's sort of horses for courses so in some cities like in or states like in Victoria the winter use of gas is huge and the studies that I've seen where they actually look at doing electricity substitution versus a hydrogen substitution because of the extra electricity infrastructure that you would need a hydrogen substitution is clearly less expensive than a wholesale electricity substitution but that won't always be the case but the reality is you've got a lot of stock there you've got a lot of investment in you know in distribution pipelines and houses with central heating and gas cooking and gas hot water and things like that and it takes a long time for people to turn around houses through renovations or demolishment and rebuild so there's a lot of reason to give people a quicker solution to reuse what they've got by substituting their emitting methane with zero emissions hydrogen so it'll be worked out city by city suburb by suburb but the reality is we can't jump into it too fast a 10 substitution can be done without changing meters without changing appliances gives us a lot of experience and would take us probably till the end of the decade in any event and so the decision as to where to go after that does one make the leap to pure hydrogen and keep the distribution networks in individual neighbourhood orders one makes a leap to go to electricity substitution is a watch this space kind of decision very good thank you Alan and now we'll just switch gears a little bit and talk a little bit more about the investment element of this and there's a question from Jenny Sinclair which reads where do you think that the private investment to match the government funds will come from will this be existing energy firms will it be other sources I don't know what Jenny's thinking of here but I guess she's thinking about I don't know superannuation funds or other big investment houses and maybe it's an opportunity to bring in discussion from Anna and and Llewellyn about this particular aspect indeed if Australia is to move down the pathway of being a renewable energy powerhouse for the world the same way it's already a powerhouse for the world in conventional fuels where will the investment come from to make the best use of that opportunity which will absolutely dwarf the the transition that the national electricity market is going to make so I'll open that up for the panel for discussion sure look there's an increasing volume of private sector investment that wants to align with the Paris agreement goals there the net zero asset owners alliance is a club of trillions of dollars of funds under management by financial institutions globally you can see their members online another announcement yesterday by JP Morgan Chase in the US committing to align their entire lending portfolio to the net zero emissions goal by mid-century for the Paris agreement some of Australia's banks have made the same commitment those commitments are still in their fresh stage of made the commitment haven't yet mapped out the trajectory so there's a bit of implementation steps to go but once the commitment's made you can be assured there are staff tasked to work on that now what though and and certainly we find that's global and Australia is an attractive market so when the CFC and arena did the large-scale solar round new international banks partnered with some of the engineering and technology suppliers to become bidders in the consortia who were successful and so we know that that creating demand through that sort of structure attracts the investors when Alan referred to the investment certainty that's often a cry from the investor community often that certainty is referring to something like an off-take agreement or it's around the will the demand exist question rather than is there risk in this technology and for example I've heard often discussions in the hydrogen space and perhaps Patrick or the wellan might jump in on this one but saying that private sector plenty are happy to take technology risk they can do the due diligence on the equipment the provider are they going to be around in time to prepare the stuff has it got a track history they're good at doing that due diligence but something like electricity price risk that's subject to an uncertain policy environment and and some surprises along the way is something that makes investors nervous and pushes up the price of capital so there's risk and there's risk when investors look into what the true costs are and what affects their appetite to invest in a much more committed and large-scale way I might add something to that came as well if that's okay just yeah just absolutely right and just in terms of who who is really investing in this space in the hydrogen space it's a combination but there are you know very large global players in the energy production and retail space that are really putting together these proposals looking for those off-take agreements and ready to ready to go so it'll be it'll be you know some of the some of the very deep pockets multinational pockets but also of course new technology new new new industry opportunities for technology developers etc as well and there's history indeed in Australia's infrastructure development the LNG sector which is of course now one of the world leaders if not the largest export sector first when Australia competes worldwide on that on that product about 30 years ago the first major off-take contract was provided by the west australian government which helped catalyze the initial investment which then led to the expansion of the sector so it's certainly been a practice in the past and I would hope we will see a lot more of it in the future in relation to low emissions technologies yeah and I was going to raise the example of LNG it's a terrific example in that case I think you know to draw on and you can see some similar dynamics in the hydrogen space today with the demonstration project that's being built in victoria for example you know I don't know if you know coal and ccs is necessary the long-term pathway one would want to go down work for with hydrogen ultimately also from a competitive perspective perhaps you know as green hydrogen with renewables becomes more competitive but you know there's a large consortium of you know Japanese investors who are investing in that project and hoping to move it onto a commercial basis you know they've got very deep pockets that set aside from the the you know the financial side that Anna talked about so I think there's no real concern over whether there's enough money to invest in these areas so on this policy certainty exists it's just so very very important you know I do quite a lot of work regionally in the offshore wind space and you know and with companies I speak with with which are investing in the growing markets in Taiwan and South Korea in Japan when they ask them what they're thinking about in Australia they say oh we're just we're just not sure what's going on with the electricity market there so we'll wait wait to see so I think you know again to Anna's point that you know that the policy certainty is you know really really important in terms of you know providing an environment that enables that that capital to come in. A couple of things for me first of all the rate of investment into solar and wind in Australia is just massive I think it was research that came out of the ANU earlier this year that showed that 2018 2019 and now ongoing in 2020 solar and wind electricity is being invested in Australia at 10 times the international average three times Germany we've got the highest per capita rate of investment in solar and wind by investors so yeah there is genuine interest in Australia by investors in clean tech to do that. To your question is it always going to be traditional energy companies the answer is clearly not it's not a hydrogen investment but I just find it fantastic the sun cable which is the very bold and possibly quite practical intention to send an undersea cable to Singapore and a few other things associated with that is by digital tech magnate and an iron ore mining magnate you know so it's Mike Cannon Brooks and Andrew Forrest so the excitement around the opportunity of clean energy technologies or any clean technologies is drawing people from the non-traditional spaces for sure but the most important thing is Anna you talk about these trillion dollar investment funds and JP Morgan and things like that incredibly important and I'm sure you're right once they've made the commitment they will come up with a pathway for their investment a plan for their investment but going back to yours and the wellans and my comments are they going to invest in building demand or are they always looking in building new technologies for the supply side and I worry that most people want to jump in on the supply side and we're not seeing enough on the demand side and that's why Japan hasn't met its targets for hydrogen fuel cars or other vehicles we really got to focus on the demand if they could invest in in helping the manufacturers today of marine diesel engines to modify those designs to become marine ammonia reciprocating engines cost effectively probably at a loss in the you know in the first few ships that would build enormous demand so do whatever you can Anna to get them looking at demand demand demand and a bit of demand and that's where government plays a role in helping private sector get over that cutting the first cookie hurdle but you're right very large banks the mainstream banks they they they want to wait till something's not first of a kind and so something like a reverse auction program that said we government in partnership with commonwealth state cfc etc wish to be the demand for five marine engines being refurbished and bid to us the minimum support you would need to do the refurbishment from a pot of maximum size x that's how reverse auctions work doesn't need to be only for kilowatt hour type generation or megawatts of of solar it can be for number of ship engines it could be for the number of low income households retrofitted for energy efficiency to a certain energy productivity improvement you know you could say bid us the suppliers who can do x hundred homes per annum for four years in a row and then you only get the bidders who worked out a delivery model that does it efficiently and they have this opportunity of essentially a grant for some sort of push part the cash part and some ongoing debt funding to allay the cost of their own investment internally in getting ready for that first cookie that's often what it takes that's what the first offtaker did in lng it's it's essentially the equivalent of being the first offtake offtake is just being a first buyer and and government can then pull through all of that other money but it doesn't step in in absence of that we found terrific well thank you very much everybody for your contributions to this discussion we've now reached the end of our allotted time we still have a lot of questions up there on the q&a which we'll endeavour to answer after the event if you would like to simply email your question to energy.change at anu.edu.au then we will pass this on to the relevant panel member and hopefully you'll be able to get an answer by early next week we'll put that email address in the chat for you to pick up more easily but now i'd like to just say that there will be a follow-up on monday to this discussion of the low emissions technology statement this will focus more around the carbon capture and use the ccs and the soil carbon storage side of things it will be presented by the anu climate change institute so that's monday october the 12th we put the url in the chat for you to to grab that so we look forward to your participation in that follow-on from this deep dive into the low emissions technology statement for for this evening so it now just rest with me to thank our keynote presenter Dr Alan Finkel our panelists Patrick Hartley from CSIRO Liz Ratnam from ANU, Llewellyn Hughes from ANU and Anna Skarbek from ClimateWorks for their contribution to the discussion this afternoon we I think had a very engaged audience of well over 200 people more than half of whom remain right to the end so that's very good to see and we look forward to welcoming you at future energy change institute webinars please take a look at our website and you'll see the upcoming events and we look forward to seeing you at one of those events in the future so thank you everybody in the audience thank you to the panel members and thank you again to Dr Alan Finkel and thank you Ken for sharing it so well good and I hope you have a good evening uh I'd ask the panelists just to turn off all their mics and we look forward to talking to you in the near future good night everybody