 So Ken, do you think we will see something like 50% renewables or more in the electricity system in 2030? I think we might even get there before then. You know, the latest data from the Clean Energy Regulator shows that we're on course for reaching that number if nothing intervenes by around the middle of the 2020s. Of course, a lot of things could intervene, but by and large, our industry has shown the capacity to deliver the world's highest rate of renewables per capita and we're just going gangbusters in that area. Yes, we've seen a massive improvement in the economics of renewables and the competition is really on now between wind and solar and existing coal let alone any new coal-fired power stations that would just simply not be competitive but nevertheless there's issues because the more renewables we have the more we need to invest in transmission and also in storage. That's right. And so that's the areas to my analysis that we'll need looking after from a policy regulatory sense in the 2020s. Indeed, and I think this is the key issue that Australia does need a policy that aligns energy and climate targets, particularly electricity sector reform and transmission and storage are a key element of that but I think also having a policy certainty around environmental issues is also very important. And of course the big word that no one dares utter in the political sphere in Australia these days is price on carbon and so that would make for an economically effective and cost effective outcome but of course there's other ways that you can achieve relatively similar outcome with different policy approaches that could apply in individual sectors and I guess we see both major parties moving in that direction perhaps at differing speed but clearly that is the direction that things are moving in. I agree and I think you know the world is moving that way as well so Australia you know is in an international context when it comes to trade if our major trading partners are moving in the direction of carbon pricing whether it be in a particular sector or across the board then Australian export industries will obviously have to conform with that and that will then feed back into the domestic circumstances as well. So I think you're right eventually that will happen. I decided politics will have to address that and that will mean that in Australia eventually we'll have a carbon pricing system of some sort or another in the future. One of the topics that are of extreme interest in our conversations in particular with state governments but also federal governments and local communities is the transition that we will see in the energy system. So we have a very clear picture of how in the long term we will see coal replaced by renewables plus storage but of course that means less employment in particular regional localities where the coal plants are, where the coal mines are and new opportunities springing up but not necessarily in the same place and so we've seen that happen in the Littrow Valley we'll see it happen again in Victoria, in New South Wales and further down the track probably in Queensland as well. So to our mind this is an important area for future governments to look into and not just to look into but to help proactively in making that transition happen and in helping create predictability around that so that the next batch of closures of large coal fired power stations don't just happen with very little notice but so that they can happen on an anticipated time scale with time to prepare for the local communities time for companies to put in place safety mechanisms social safety nets and also for that replacement investment to be there at a good time scale. That's right I agree and you know this massive transformation that's going to happen in our economy and our energy sector in particular over the coming decades needs to ensure that nobody gets left behind particularly the people as you mentioned that are in industries that are going to transition into new industries but also from the consumer perspective the consumers aren't left behind as well so you know it's great to have the world's highest level of solar PV penetration on rooftops of 20% in the world but we want to make sure that everyone can benefit from that and people on low income should be a participant in this transition process as well as people on higher income so I think the transition social equity issues are very very important and both sides of politics have to look into that. However I would say that on the renewable side of things that because of this capability the Australian industry has demonstrated and the very rapid roll out of renewables that we could find unexpected closures of coal-fired power stations just simply because economics is driving this without a plan beforehand. So there is a clear need for governments to be involved in brokering these discussions because without it we could just find that the sheer economics of renewables is closing plants much earlier than anticipated and this could provide significant dislocation issues. It could very well do so and what we've seen in unanticipated closures is price spikes for electricity because the replacement investment isn't there on time and so consumer prices I think are very rightly in the headlines and of course part of that equation is the gas price which has risen a lot so Ken how do you see the future of gas in Australia's energy mix? Well that's another interesting question because gas quite clearly is regarded as a transition fuel by many people that you could replace coal with gas at the generator level and this would reduce our emissions by roughly half in terms of the amount of electricity being produced but nonetheless you have to look at the price side of things as well and this is where coupling to the international price on gas is an issue because the domestic price will follow that and the other thing that's coming up of course is the potential for gas to be replaced by hydrogen that's a very long term prospect it again might be driven by external factors like Japan and Korea mandating a hydrogen economy by a particular point in time and Australia being a major provider so we might simply provide them with a hydrogen they need potentially generated by renewables through electrolysis from water and this would create an international price and if we wanted to do the same thing in Australia to replace gas then we'd be price takers in that market as well so again very interesting questions following on from our experience and lessons in the LNG industry and there we're getting to a very exciting topic that I think all major parties in Australia would actually be behind and that is Australia as an energy superpower in a low carbon world so we have all the natural prerequisites for this we have the lows, the sun shines, we have the ports we have the land, we have the experience in energy markets and as an energy exporter and increasingly this is something that people come to realise this is no longer just in the universities of this country but increasingly that's a topic for governments and business Australia is a massive producer of hydrogen and higher order synthetic fuels based on renewables and the other thing to think about too is prospects for directly exporting electricity through undersea cables to Indonesia and beyond and indeed this is part of our ANU Grand Challenge to look into these prospects for exporting electricity exporting hydrogen, exporting value added renewable energy embedded in other products like refined metals so there are huge opportunities to transform the way Australia trades with the world based on renewable energy and simply shift from a largely fossil fuel based trading system coal and gas as well as carbon intensive export of iron ore which eventually uses carbon to create steel and we could transform that completely into an export industry based on renewables and that transition will inevitably happen over the next decades as fossil fuels become less and less a part of the energy mix worldwide and I think we have huge opportunities that we can grasp in this space as well and the research that we and others have done shows quite clearly that 100% renewables or close to 100% renewables in Australia as possible but there's actually no need to stop there it could be 200% renewables with the other 100% for export through the region we can be the exporter the region supplier of renewable energy indeed and why not 500% renewables if we use it to turn iron ore into steel and other products so yes absolutely and if we can arrange that in a way so that Australia actually reaps a lot of the economic benefits from this as well so big challenges for future governments in that as well that's right and you can see in the long term future that Australia is moving into a position where we can value add to all these wonderful resources that we have in this country in a way that we've never done before and potentially we could set ourselves up with a sovereign wealth fund that could see our future generations not having to worry about infrastructure and many of the other aspects of investment in our society based on renewable energy and Ken where is nuclear and all of this? so I think probably the window for nuclear is rapidly closing or is maybe closed already there requires at least a mandate from the population to make this happen this might take five years it would take maybe five years to set up a regulatory framework as well and then if you're going to build a nuclear power station on the basis that we're going to go ahead with this it would take another five years after that so we're talking sometime in the 2030s before we'd ever see something happening and by then the cost of renewables plus storage might be so much cheaper that it simply would price nuclear out of the market so I think that probably the window is closed or almost closed but there is the prospect of one opportunity arising perhaps even in remote areas which is the use of small modular reactors and these are at the scale of 100 megawatts or several hundred megawatts which are self-contained they could be used I don't know to power a mining operation out in the middle of the desert and you can add to those one by one by one just to increase the capacity so there may be an opportunity there for the social licence for us to do that I think even more importantly is the role that we might play in the international nuclear fuel cycle not only is one of the world's largest uranium producers and the largest repository of uranium in the world but also potentially to store other people's nuclear waste in the future and this was raised for example in the South Australian raw commission into the nuclear fuel cycle so we might be a participant in that we're a very stable country geologically, politically, economically there are great attractions in that sphere for other countries to make us the good citizen of the world in storing nuclear waste in an environment which should all remain in for a long time Frank I mean you know we've discussed this before that we've been in a policy free environment now for more than a decade in terms of energy aligning with climate or maybe a policy confused environment indeed so is this election an opportunity for that to change? Could it be a tipping point we might end up with an alignment of energy and climate policy that will see us into the future what are your thoughts there? Oh my, I mean industry and investors are just crying out for that for some not even policy certainty but policy predictability and stability and there is a chance, yes but what that requires is for climate change policy and energy policy to disappear from the front pages of the newspapers and once that happens some better work can be done there's different scenarios for how that could happen for how we could see the politics being taken out of these issues or at least put in the background and the policy and economics of this being put in the foreground and let's hope that might happen after this election Indeed and it'll be up to the voters in the long run and they have the choice now I guess and if they look at the opposition and they look at the government and they look at all the other parties they might see that there are differences there and I think the interesting thing and the unique thing about this election at least at the moment is that here we have one side of politics talking about policies to align energy and climate and the other side with no policy and so I think it's very unusual circumstance to find ourselves in this close to election maybe it'll come out in a few weeks but as an academic, most academics are unwilling to make a call on to vote for one party or other but when one party has a policy and one doesn't I think there's a very clear choice for the electorate