Sydney Morning Herald
-
Alan Finkel
Like others, I dream that my great-grandchildren, whom I might never meet, will
grow up living on a planet just as magnificent as it was when I was young.
Fulfilment of this dream will require that we preserve our planet’s
unique beauty in the face of global warming, armed with ambition and realism. We
do not have time for fatalism or despair.
|
Field of dreams ... Australia needs to seize the global energy
transformation.
|
Achieving net-zero emissions will be difficult, but is not impossible. We cannot
simply shut down the use of fossil fuels overnight, because our civilisation
needs energy. Instead, we must harness science and technology to develop
alternatives that make fossil fuels obsolete.
We must replace our
19th-century energy sources with 21st-century alternatives: low-emissions
technologies that will undo the problems wrought by the high-emissions
incumbents. Technology to solve technology’s problems. This will take an
adaptive, technology-based plan to maintain our quality of living and reap the
benefits of the transition.
“You never change things by fighting the existing reality,” said the American
futurist Buckminster Fuller. “To change something, build a new model that makes
the existing model obsolete.”
The plan will involve a massive global commitment to solar, wind and hydro (and
in some countries, nuclear) electricity, to transmission lines and storage,
distributed generation and variable loads.
We will need to change
the way we farm food and process it, our vehicles and transport systems, our
building designs and heating and cooling systems, our industrial processes. And
we will need effective, affordable geosequestration and biosequestration to deal
with the hard-to-abate emissions that will remain with us despite all these
efforts.
A meeting of the minds is required, so that we can use tools that are good, but
not perfect, to accelerate the transformation. For most of us, the motivation
for a switch to clean energy is to mitigate climate change.
That
is reason enough. But shifting to a net-zero-emissions economy has other
advantages. It will rid us of our dependence on a finite resource – fossil fuels
– and it will ensure better air quality, cheaper energy, and participation in a
global economic transformation.
Thus, even those who are not
convinced about the threat posed by climate change should be enthusiastic about
the transformations that are under way and contemplated, because they will
ultimately contribute to prosperity, new exports and a healthier environment.
We are in the early stages of an energy revolution. The industrial revolution
began with the use of coal to create steam for industry and for locomotion.
Note, though, that coal did not replace the use of wood, dried manure and other
biomass for heating. Instead, it massively expanded energy use.
Along came oil. It eventually displaced the use of coal for
locomotion in trains and ships, but not for steam and electricity production.
Along came natural gas. It eventually displaced the use of town gas made from
coal, and much of the use of oil for heating, but not for transport and
electricity production.
Since the start of the industrial age, these
three fossil fuels – coal, oil and natural gas – have added to our total fuel
use rather than replacing the old. This additive adoption of new fuels has
resulted in greenhouse gas emissions increasing year after year.
The latest energy revolution, already under way, is different. Electricity from
predominantly renewable energy will eventually completely replace all three
fossil fuels as energy sources.
Oil and natural gas will likely
remain as chemical feedstocks in some manufacturing, but their use as a fuel
will fade into obsolescence.
The burning questions are: How long
will that take? Can we accelerate the process? Can we do so while reaping
economic benefits and creating new jobs to replace the old?
My Quarterly Essay
Getting to Zero traces a pathway to a clean-energy
future for Australia, a crucially important task that I began to dabble in
before my five-year term as Australia’s chief scientist began, and which turned
out to be a major component of my work in that role, way beyond anything I
imagined when I started.
|
Chevron's Gorgon LNG project off Western Australia.
|
In the essay, I tackle some of the controversial and difficult questions, such
as the role of natural gas in the coming decades, and share some confounding
personal moments from Australia’s recent climate debate.
But my
overarching thesis is that just as 19th-century technology has brought us to an
urgent moment in the history of our planet, 21st-century technology will light
the way forward.
How do we change the practices of our civilisation? We make a plan. The plan
must recognise the realities – of scale, difficulty and uncertainty. The plan
must be ambitious but not naive, must start by acknowledging how difficult
decarbonisation will be, and must keep costs for the consumer as low as
possible and ensure service remains reliable.
At length in the essay, I discuss what I call “The Electric Planet” and the
solutions to the different sectors in turn but in a few sentences it goes like
this.
Step 1: Replace all the existing electricity generation
with zero-emissions electricity.
Step 2: Generate lots more
zero-emissions electricity, so that we can use it for stationary energy and
transport.
Step 3: Generate lots more electricity, so that we can
use it to make hydrogen for those instances where electrons are not ideal and a
high-density molecular fuel is needed, or to replace natural gas and coal in
some cases as a chemical feedstock for industry.
Step 4: For
Australia, generate many times more electricity, to produce hydrogen for export.
Step 5: Produce lots more electricity, to produce goods that embody
large amounts of energy, such as zero-emissions steel and zero-emissions
aluminium.
All these steps can happen in parallel.
Although they are simple structures, there are surprises hiding inside wind
turbines.
Change is in the air. The global momentum and enthusiasm for solar and wind as
our future primary energy sources, supported by big batteries, hydrogen, other
storage technologies, distributed energy generation, managed loads and digital
technologies, across all sectors of our economy, including transport and
industry, is growing every day.
I sense we will live through a
technological revolution this decade as exciting as the conquest of space in the
1960s.
If Australia handles the challenge well, we can build an economy that takes
advantage of the transition. If we cling to the past, we will miss opportunities
that the rest of the world will seize.
The last thing we want is to
be cave dwellers, watching the future march back and forth outside the cave
opening.
The scale of the job is vast and it will take decades. But
we must be part of the revolution rather than left behind.
As the
Borg said in
Star Trek: The Next Generation: “Resistance is futile.”
Links
