TOMORROWLAND 22: The University of New South Wales’ Deo Prasad is sitting on grants of more than $230 million right now to commercialise new energy and recycling technologies.
He’s got some pretty impressive ideas that will innovate the energy space and some of them are not what you’d expect.
Deo Prasad will be at Tomorrowland 22 – will you?
First of course it’s all about scale and economic impact. So, jobs and growth. Which will resonate nicely for politicians and industry alike.
“You want to make sure that we are ahead of the pack in capturing the commercialisation with the products that lead to decarbonisation,” he flags.
The numbers, thanks to PricewaterhouseCoopers, are in and the metrics look good, “in terms of how many jobs we are looking at, and how many billions of dollars of economic impact over time.”
The funding comes from a mix of the federal government’s Trailblazer program (ATRaCE), a four year intensive program worth around $230 million and the NSW government’s Decarbonisation Innovation Hub which Prasad describes as the “front door” to innovation in Clean energy investment in NSW and a feature part of the NSW government’s Decarbonisation 2030 Plan.
It has a seed investment of $15 million from NSW government with university partners in NSW and industry contributing to fund projects.
But it’s not just the tech that will drive the desired outcomes. There are cultural and enabling issues too. And that’s something the casual observer may not so easily have fathomed. Like us! In fact, The Fifth Estate has often asked why we receive a constant flow of great news around inventions and innovations from university labs but so little news of their scaling up and commercialisation.
So why don’t researchers take projects all the way? Prasad says there’s some thorny issues involved. One is the intellectual property to consider – who owns it? The researcher or the university?
“If it’s the university, the benefits are hard to gauge so there’s less incentive to take things all the way.”
The researcher might reason their efforts are best spent on other projects that enable them to be promoted, he says.
“Because sometimes when you start taking projects forward, you are not publishing papers, you don’t get promoted and so forth.”
So what kind of projects will Prasad be working on exactly in this new innovation hub?
Perhaps unexpectedly they’re not so much the headline breakthrough items like solar photovoltaics but their more refined iterations, like thin and semi semitransparent versions of PV that can be attached to different types of surfaces. Work on these is needed because the kind of PV recently flamboyantly unrolled on a recent QandA program doesn’t capture as much energy as it needs to – yet.
There’s also cleaner aviation fuel, “where there’s obviously much interest,” Prasad says. Or green hydrogen – ditto, (though many people The Fifth Estate speaks to caution that this should be contained for industry or transport uses, not domestic).
A lot is possible, Prasad says.
“Look at what happened with Covid. Never before was a vaccine produced in months not years.”
The same urgent need is now emerging with energy and the growing crisis in Europe thanks to the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
“Europe is already in a very cold winter and matters are already close to the level of headache the pandemic gave us.”
These are still front-end technologies that need development. And it’s not just the one headline product where the benefits can be found.
Prasad calls it “The balance of systems,” or the side issues around the headline tech that yield great results.
“There are different ways of making, storing and transporting. So these things are not always just one product, which is hydrogen.
“You can make billions of dollars in storage tank facilities, or transportation facilities, safe transportation facilities. Just like with solar photovoltaics, the solar cell and the panel is one part of the system that is on your roof.”
Think about issues such as all the electronics involved in new energy systems, the rare materials.
“These are all multibillion dollar industries in their own right. So we look at those things and we say, hey, there is significant potential, there are carbon capture projects, there’s a lot of things to look at as the grid becomes much more renewables driven. There is a lot of work that needs to be done in fixing the grid; for having a level of intelligence in how it deals with a lot of this intermittent supply.”
In a nutshell the hub will look at the things that enable decarbonisation and as a result, create economic benefit.
So it’s one thing to keep aspiring for the highest efficiency. But our green future needs to be so much more. As Prasad says, “it’s a complex solution. We’re made of many paths.”
Prasad will reveal more specifics of this huge tranche of work at Tomorrowland 22.
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