Two people at the intersection of the biggest global changes under way that will determine our future: Matt Kean, chair of the Climate Change Authority on the politics; Martijn Wilder, founder of Pollination and chair of the National Reconstruction Authority on capital.
Before us the chasms of climate doom cleaved out by the new administration in the US. But also the opportunities that clever, creative people can see opening up.
The occasion, our first monthly leaders forums at Greenhouse, Sydney: a packed room; an overload of (positive) energy, along with curiosity and not a skerrick of hesitation when it came to question time.
Moderator: Rachel Alembakis of UEthical.
Kean wasted no time and jumped straight in.
“No matter who’s in the White House”, he said, “technology is not going to be denied. Rhetoric doesn’t trump physics.” Nor the movement of capital. “The trajectory of these megatrends is not going to be slowed.”
He was referring to the massive uptake of wind, solar and battery capacity installed over the recent years, and it’s only accelerating.
“Last year, $2 trillion worth of private capital was invested in clean energy solutions. China alone installed more solar and EVs in their system in 12 months than the US economy has in 30 years.”
And the momentum from private capital continues, he added.
These were “hard nosed Macquarie bankers that know the economics of these technologies. And that’s not going to be stopped regardless who’s in the White House.”
Australia needs to compete
Wilder had just come from a meeting with a client from Singapore who was thinking about where to invest in the world.
“Singapore throws money at us. Everyone is throwing money at us to come and set up in their jurisdiction, giving us tax cuts.
“Australia is not that good at that. We sort of say we’re a really good place to live, and quite frank, we’ll give you a few things, a few little bit of tax [incentives], but we’re not going to throw a billion dollars generally at you if you come here and we don’t have a systematic policy to actually bring industry to Australia.
“Some of the state governments are good at it, but at a federal level, we don’t do it in a way that other nations do, because we rely on the fact that this is such a good place to come.”
Labor government “going some way” along that road, he said pointing to the $2 billion recently announced to stop the troubled Whyalla green steel works from going under, the Clean Energy Finance Corporation and the National Reconstruction Fund.
But we needed to find a way to keep green steel, solar, green iron and green aluminium in Australia.
Video: catch a glimpse of the event!
Why go to the US super funds?
Unfortunately, Australia’s superannuation funds – with the second biggest pool of super money in the world (how did that happen?) were off to the US with $500 million in cheques
But when they talk of funding green energy or housing in Australia “they get slammed by the media”.
Media fragmented and often wrong
Media is half of our problem, Kean said [after lavishing this masthead with some pretty heavy praise!].
Politicians that preceded him had the luxury of needing to speak to just four television channels and two newspapers. Today there’s a fragmented media market.
“People basically choose or curate the news that aligns with their preferences. So you’ve got everyone on Twitter only subscribing to people they like and blocking everyone they don’t like.
“Trying to communicate to a mass market was really hard.”
But on the day Kean took just minutes to sum up and slam the door closed on nuclear.
First is the ridiculous expense of nuclear. It would cost $660 billion of taxpayer money [not the private capital money offered by those who propose it, as we remind our readers].
Bills would jack up six fold as well, Kean said.
The Hinkley Point C nuclear plant in the UK, started in 2007 “is not going to spit out an electron until 2028 and the British government is subsidising the cost of that electricity … to the tune of $350 per megawatt an hour.”
Australia was currently paying $120 a MWh for coal and renewables are coming in at less than $80 a MWh, he said.
What about buildings?
By the time questions opened Craig Roussac of Buildings Alive brought the discussion to a hard landing on buildings and the enormous savings that could be made through efficiencies and “time of use” management.
“Why does it never come up?” he asked. “The built environment’s more than 50 per cent of demand on the network; at peak times, it’s more than 80 per cent of demand on the network.
“We’re talking about a lot of fabulous and critical supply side solutions.”
He longed to hear those words: “efficiency, load flexibility; something around shifting [the gigawatts of solar that the Australian Energy Market Operator] is curtailing today. And buildings are trying to save energy right now, but this evening, we won’t.”
In fact, Kean said he thinks it’s one of the areas of emerging bipartisan consensus in public policy, and that’s sort of behind the meter solutions. “So I think what you’ll see at this election is the coalition and the Labor Party taking a big package of rooftop solar with battery to the community.”
Wilder agreed and said, “For reasons that are unbeknownst to me, getting energy efficiency in the built environment has been really difficult.”
He told the story of an agency, Low Carbon Australia, he chaired that could not stir up enough interest to distribute the $300 million in funds it had available.
“We spent the first year telling people what it was. We spent the second year convincing someone to take the money, and then the third year, we ran out of money within three months.”
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More snaps by TFE Member Stanley Tanudjaja
