At TFE Live on Tuesday last week, Tim Buckley, director of Climate Energy Finance and Heidi Lee, chief executive officer of Beyond Zero Emissions, delved deep into Australia’s potential as a global renewable energy superpower, the way to transform our coal mining regions to clean energy and new jobs and how China is doing so much to decarbonise the planet.
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These two leaders in the transition and moderator Maria Atkinson tackled the direction of the Future Made In Australia policy was heading in, and how China could be a partner in the ambition.
Lee said the policy was “one of those important direction-setting conversations that we need to have”.
“It’s coming in with money behind it, and it’s coming in with a program for releasing targeted investment.
And so it was great initiatives like the Solar Sunshot and money going into “dedicated areas where we have a role”.
The work BZE has embarked on is to see where we have to make “large changes in our physical environment to be able to electrify and decarbonise Australia,” Lee said.
And that’s not “about the percentage emission reductions against other numbers, arbitrary settings at some point in the past. It’s actually saying how many heat pumps, how many batteries, and how many electric vehicles. So when you start to look at some of the most prolific technologies that Australia needs to have, to add to buildings to our houses and our factories and our farms and our roads, that volume of stuff presents an enormous opportunity for Australia because everyone around the world, every country, is in the same race, and we will not all get there at the same time.”
Buckley was still struck by the advances he saw in China three months after his trip.
“Self interest is a powerful motive, but it’s also very tangible,” he said. “So I think China has deliberately decided that an energy system disruption is a massive opportunity for China to lead the world, and that’s what they’re doing.
“It’s all about galvanizing investment, technology, employment, exports, industry, policy and energy security.
“They’re also decarbonising the world if they actually can deliver on all of this.”
China doesn’t have to worry about debate and democracy.
“The government says we’re going to build literally 200 gigawatts, 300 gigawatts a year of solar, and they’re doing it. It is just mind blowing the numbers, they’re building about 22 gigawatts of wind and solar every month, and they’ve now been doing that for 20 months in a row. That’s up 100 per cent of what they were doing the previous year.
“I was looking at China’s energy system 15 years ago, 10 years ago, I put out some forecasts. They’re moving way faster than anything I forecast back then, and they’ve got the manufacturing capacity to do it.”
“It’s not just wind, it’s not utility solar, it’s rooftop solar, they’re the world leader in both of those, but way ahead of us…they’re also the world leader in battery energy storage systems. They’re the world leader in EVs and new energy vehicles…they’re the world leader in the grid. They’re the world leader in hydro, pumped hydro, batteries, solar, wind, refining of critical minerals and strategic metals. So across all of these industries, they are moving a million miles an hour.”
