Full Transcript for APAC Weekly - Episode 6

world. 00:04:21:24 - 00:04:56:07 Dr. Angela Wilkinson So we know that we have to re-think the security aspects of the  Energy Trilemma Index on transition with management of security. The security crisis is very different to the oil shock of the 1970s, which was very much about constraints of supply. This is actually a demand-driven energy crisis shock because it's countries deciding to decouple themselves from supplies in other parts of the world that have contributed to these high prices and cost of living crisis. 00:04:56:16 - 00:05:07:23 Dr. Angela Wilkinson So energy security is no longer about supply-side diversification. We now have to think about demand disruption and demand destruction in energy security. 00:05:08:11 - 00:05:23:11 Oriel Morrison You have often said that when it comes to the energy landscape overall what we see today is crowded. You've called it competitive and costly, and we need to see more sustainable energy. Are we moving fast enough when it comes to this transition? 00:05:24:17 - 00:05:58:02 Dr. Angela Wilkinson Well, the World Energy Pulse shows that most countries expect this current global energy shock will accelerate energy transition in all regions. But I think the important thing to remember is that there are multiple energy transition pathways. There's no one size fits all. Each of these pathways will have a greater mix of resources and technologies and will also use other measures such as carbon capture and storage and nature based solutions in order to achieve that net zero goals. 00:05:58:14 - 00:06:25:19 Dr. Angela Wilkinson And the other bit that we have to bear in mind as you when you opened Oriel you talked about 20% of the global energy system is currently electrified and only 50% of that 20% is renewable electricity. So as we take renewables to scale, we are finding new security issues around materials, metals and water. In terms of taking renewable energy resources to scale. 00:06:26:18 - 00:06:33:21 Oriel Morrison Is this part of your concerns you vocalized before about the lack of energy literacy across stakeholder groups? 00:06:34:24 - 00:07:04:13 Dr. Angela Wilkinson Absolutely. So energy literacy, like financial literacy, is going to come to the fore if we really want to address the scope three emissions of the Paris Agreement. That's the emissions you and I are responsible for in our use of energy directly and indirectly. And there's no way to do that without thinking about what we mean by useful energy and uses and affordability, as well as security and climate change. 00:07:04:19 - 00:07:27:09 Dr. Angela Wilkinson And affordability isn't just about willingness to pay or ability to pay. It's also value in use. And our uses of energy are changing. And our needs and how we're storing energy is changing. And the costs of supplying energy are not being fully priced in to some of these comparisons around different energy options. 00:07:27:24 - 00:07:44:04 Oriel Morrison Now, if we look at some of the latest results that's come out of the Trilemma index, they show that renewables account for over 80% of new capacity additions, but global carbon dioxide emissions still continue to rise. What is the solution here? 00:07:45:21 - 00:08:11:07 Dr. Angela Wilkinson Well, our solution is to humanizing energy. That is, you've got to involve uses and uses, not just think about suppliers and producers. Most of the attention around investment at the moment is about investing in new supplies that are clean and green. But actually we can't address the Paris Agreement or the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals without thinking about the people side of energy. 00:08:11:07 - 00:08:32:19 Dr. Angela Wilkinson Who are the users? What are their behaviours? What's their understanding of role in energy transition? And how do we enable and empower them to play their part? So I think the answer is humanizing energy rather than keep keeping this conversation around the supply-centric mindset that we think dominates policy and discourse at the moment. 00:08:33:19 - 00:08:50:02 Oriel Morrison Now, when you look at the geographic picture, Angela, of course, you're coming to us from from London today. We know that Europe is doing fairly well when it comes to the transition. How does this region, how does the Asia-Pacific region stack up? 00:08:50:15 - 00:09:13:13 Dr. Angela Wilkinson Well, our council operates in over 94 countries across the world. So, you know, I'm here in London, but our members are distributed across the entire world and all regions. And there are big differences. There are big differences in narrative as well around what what's the story of getting to net zero. So in Europe, we tend to talk about clean and just energy transitions. 00:09:14:02 - 00:09:44:18 Dr. Angela Wilkinson In North America, they tend to talk about resilient and sustainable energy transitions. In the Middle East they tend to talk about circular carbon economy transitions. And in the Asia region, I think there's five H's actually in our in our membership, there's not one Asia. There's also a concept of ecological civilization, which I find fascinating, because it's the only frame, really, that says this is about people and planet, whereas the others are really about technologies and investments. 00:09:46:01 - 00:10:13:22 Jason Dasey It's a fascinating piece of work that challenges our long held belief and understanding about how continents on earth were formed. Research from Curtin University recently published in 'Geology', concludes Earth was hit by comets as our solar system passed into and out of the arms of the Milky Way galaxy. Lead researcher Professor Chris Kirkland joins me now. Professor, how did your team arrive at this conclusion? 00:10:15:09 - 00:10:35:21 Professor Chris Kirkland Thanks very much for the interest in our research. Yeah, so we've been we've been interested in the age of rocks for a very long time here at Curtin. And we've got a range of

analytical kit we've been using to date material from all around the planet. And from this massive collection of information, we noticed patterns within it. 00:10:35:22 - 00:10:47:13 Professor Chris Kirkland So it's really from this big data and the patterns that are held within it that we we started to to infer these larger scale processes that have affected our planet. 00:10:48:06 - 00:11:01:00 Jason Dasey Well, it really is fascinating stuff. So within the scientific community, how has this work been received? because it certainly does turn traditional thinking on its head that external and not internal forces shaped our world? 00:11:01:15 - 00:11:27:05 Professor Chris Kirkland Yeah, that's absolutely correct. So as geologists, we normally think of processes internal to the planet creating the crust we live on. So it is a little bit of a controversial theory, but I guess just, you know, we look up at the moon and we can see a crater surface. And Earth has obviously seen much more craters and much more impacting events than the moon, simply because we're a much larger mass and we've got a larger gravity well and more material falls in and hits our planet. So it's a controversial theory, but it explains quite a lot of observations we have. 00:11:36:05 - 00:11:44:10 Jason Dasey I mean, it conjures up amazing imagery, doesn't it? What would have been the result of those comet impacts on earth? What exactly did they do to our planet? 00:11:45:07 - 00:12:05:24 Professor Chris Kirkland So cometary impacts ... that's a massive amount of energy that's being instantaneously transferred into the crust of our planet. So you can imagine a fireball coming in and hitting the surface of the planet. And what that does is that it excavates a large volume of material from the crust of the planet. And what happens when you excavate a large volume of material? 00:12:06:04 - 00:12:34:11 Professor Chris Kirkland It's very much like undoing the lid of a bottle of soda or a bottle. Massive volumes of liquid rock would rise to the surface and that's what solidifies and produces new crust. So the datasets that we have tell us about a shallow impacting process. And that's what we use to infer this periodic bombardment of our planet roughly every 200 million years. 00:12:35:04 - 00:12:45:12 Jason Dasey Was this idea of linking land masses and their mineral resources with the passage of the solar system a new direction for science? So does it actually build on previous work? 00:12:46:05 - 00:13:12:13 Professor Chris Kirkland Yeah, great question. So there's actually been quite a bit of work already that points to periodic mass extinctions due to cometary impacts on roughly the same sort of frequency. The thing with dealing with mass extinctions is we're limited to obviously only when there's visible life forms or fossil records. So by looking at the mineral record, we're able to go much further back into what we know as geologists we call deep time. 00:13:12:13 - 00:13:29:23 Professor Chris Kirkland So we're looking three to nearly four billion years ago into that deep time of our planet. And we're back to the processes of crust production. So there has been ideas already, but we're really extending that information into the formative history of our planet. 00:13:30:19 - 00:13:38:24 Jason Dasey So where to next for your team? Are you continuing this core research or is it taking you in another controversial or radical direction? 00:13:39:24 - 00:14:02:06 Professor Chris Kirkland So, I mean, I think one of the things we'd like to do is look and see if we can see this similar periodicity, the similar timing on other pieces of crust. So we would like to go to other cratons, other old bits of the planet and see if we see a similar signature. But also we'd be very much interested in looking and seeing at the lunar surface. 00:14:02:06 - 00:14:10:07 Professor Chris Kirkland Dating bits of the moon to see if we can see this similar periodicity, which would help to sure up this quite controversial theory. 00:14:11:01 - 00:14:22:14 Jason Dasey As technology improves, machine learning matures and quantum computing takes hold, can we expect our understanding of the cosmos and our place in it will continue to evolve? 00:14:23:05 - 00:14:52:11 Professor Chris Kirkland I think absolutely so. We're already dealing with large amounts of data produced over many years, and that's what helps us see this pattern, this timing, this frequency of events. But we're also trying to win out into different subject areas. So we're thinking about astrophysics and looking at quite complex simulations of how the solar system orbits the galaxy. So we're trying to link in these very different datasets to each other, and that really helps when we've got large computing powers. 00:14:53:00 - 00:15:21:03 Oriel Morrison Europe is leading the world in transitioning its major cities to this cycle-first. Amsterdam, Paris, Copenhagen in particular have pioneered the implementation of low risk cycling infrastructure, and the public adoption has exceeded expectations. Asia and Oceania are well behind. Further compounding the challenge of achieving net zero by 2050. What lessons can be learned from the Northern Hemisphere? It's not quite as straightforward as resetting planning policy to embrace cycle first. 00:15:21:15 - 00:15:41:01 Oriel Morrison Professor Matthew Burke joins us now. Matthew is the deputy director of Griffith University's Cities Research Institute. Professor, welcome. Thanks so much for joining us today. Now, in recent years, there's been a significant investment in dedicated cycleways and bike paths. But you believe and in fact, you've been public about this in saying that that's just not enough. 00:15:42:07 - 00:16:06:21 Professor Matthew Burke It's the rate at which we're developing that's not enough. You know, I'm quoted as saying this a number of times now that, you know, I don't have children, but if I had a child in the

next couple of years, it would only be my grandchildren who might be middle age if their life actually see a low risk quality cycling network in Australia at the right way developing it. 00:16:07:24 - 00:16:40:15 Professor Matthew Burke So we're not able to transition or make the kind of contribution to net zero that we hope cycling could make by the year 2050. And it's not just cycling now, it's also all those micro electric modes, the the light electric scooters, the e-bikes and the other modes of transportation that have made this kind of shared path travel available to a much wider segment of the community than ever before. 00:16:41:16 - 00:16:59:15 Oriel Morrison Now, Matt, you're doing a lot of work on this at the moment in different spaces. At the moment. You're working on three projects with regards to to cycling right now. Your first one is planning contentious cycling infrastructure in existing neighborhoods. Tell us a little bit about this and how that's going for you. 00:17:00:00 - 00:17:25:11 Professor Matthew Burke I think we've got some problems with how we do transport planning in Australian cities, not just here and New Zealand, much of the world actually. So for instance, my street at the very front here was resealed for the first time in decades, just recently, and they cut up all the bitumen related and they relaid the street exactly like it was laiddown in the 1970s. 00:17:26:01 - 00:17:56:20 Professor Matthew Burke And the way the street is designed is really not good for pedestrians. It's not really good for anyone but motorists who would like to drive fast through this neighborhood. No one came to this community and said, how could we do three things to do this better? What what little things could we do when we reseal and and and relay these three that would really make it better for you as a community? 00:17:57:08 - 00:18:06:23 Professor Matthew Burke And there are some really simple things here that would have made it much better for walking and cycling. And the other problem there, of course, is speed, speed limits. 00:18:07:14 - 00:18:12:24 Oriel Morrison Well, let's touch on speed limits while we're talking about it. What should speed limits be? 00:18:13:04 - 00:18:34:02 Professor Matthew Burke Most of us live on a 50k per hour street. Most of us live deep in suburbia or in the grid of an inner suburb on a street that really doesn't warrant lots of traffic, doesn't have a lot of traffic. And that percentage of streets, probably 80% of urban streets in Australia should really be at 30k per hour. 00:18:34:15 - 00:18:45:21 Professor Matthew Burke And it's not just me saying that it's now the Europeans, the British, the Americans, Washington, D.C. all their little local streets are now down at 20 miles per hour, 30k per hour. 00:18:46:02 - 00:19:04:11 Oriel Morrison One of your other research projects that you're working on at the moment is one that I'm find particularly interesting. And that's that's the use of e-scooters and the e-bike sharing systems, the public sharing systems that are out there. What are you finding because you're doing some research on both the impacts but also the benefits of these kind of systems? 00:19:05:07 - 00:19:31:13 Professor Matthew Burke Yeah. So we've done a series of studies here on these new public e-scooter systems, and probably the one that got the most attention was the first to ever look at the tourism impacts of these these new devices. And we wanted to know where visitors were going with the scooters. And in particular, we wanted to know whether scootering seemed to affect their spending habits. 00:19:32:15 - 00:19:56:20 Professor Matthew Burke And we had a couple of key findings. First of all, it wasn't just young men on scooters. There were lots of women and there were Boomers on scooters. So this was the myth is it's all young people going crazy, having fun here. We had older generations, Gen Xers and Boomers, using them in large numbers to do purposeful travel for tourism. 00:19:58:02 - 00:20:22:13 Professor Chris Kirkland The other key finding was the people. They'd all paid the same amount for a weekend pass for their scooter travel. But those who used the scooters more spent the most. Also, it looked like from their destinations in what we would call 'mum and dad businesses', local businesses, local cafes, local restaurants, local retailers. 00:20:22:18 - 00:20:40:02 Oriel Morrison Just before we go, Matt, I wanted to touch on this last area, the third area of research that you're working on, which is interesting for the businesses out there that are that are listening to us today, because you're working on the economic value of protected bicycle lanes for the adjacent businesses that are around those lanes. Tell us about that. 00:20:41:00 - 00:21:14:08 Professor Matthew Burke Okay. So we did a kind of the world's first study on how people got to restaurants and how money got to restaurants. And we went into cafes and restaurants and we asked them all, how did people get to your business? What percentage of your customers come by walking or by cycling or by using public transport or by driving and which type of person spends the most amount of money and all the businesses, almost every business owner or manager. 00:21:14:08 - 00:21:43:13 Professor Matthew Burke And we spoke to the managers and the business owners and they would say to us 'car drivers' are the majority of the people who come here and they spend the most, they spend more than someone who comes by train or by bus spend more than cyclists, spend more than walkers. Then we went and surveyed 300 customers, 100 each at different times of day and night in these different precincts. 00:21:43:13 - 00:22:09:09 Professor Matthew Burke And we asked them, how did you get to these businesses - that included people who were going to the really fancy sort of restaurants with their stars and all the rest of it down to more, you know, middle class and type

restaurants. And what we found was that the business owners just didn't understand their market car was responsible for way less income than what they thought. 00:22:10:02 - 00:22:34:22 Oriel Morrison A major economic overhaul is needed if Australia is to achieve a net zero future, according to researchers from the Net Zero Australia Project. The joint study is undertaken by the University of Queensland, Melbourne and Princeton University and it shows that a net zero future is going to be far more complex than anticipated. Simon Smart joins us now, associate professor from the School of Chemical Engineering at the University of Queensland. 00:22:35:04 - 00:22:40:16 Oriel Morrison Simon, welcome. You've analyzed five possible zero emissions scenarios. What have you found? 00:22:42:01 - 00:23:03:09 Associate Professor Simon Smart So we came up with around ten key takeaways. Some of them, I guess, are more obvious than others that renewables will produce most or all of the domestic energy by 2050. Others, like the fact that domestic energy share of GDP need not rise above today's levels, were perhaps less foreseen. 00:23:03:21 - 00:23:14:16 Oriel Morrison Simon you've said before that we do need to think differently about technology, but also about the required infrastructure that it's going to take to get us to a net zero future. What exactly do you mean by that? 00:23:16:03 - 00:23:42:18 Associate Professor Simon Smart Well, the pace and scale at which we need to build infrastructure to transition to a net zero future is really unprecedented. And so that means us thinking differently about how we go through the planning and permitting process. It also means that we need to think differently about how we go through and think about our workforce. We'll need 1 to 1.3 million new workers, according to our study, by 2060. 00:23:43:17 - 00:24:01:21 Dr. Angela Wilkinson So that also means that we have to think about new training, you know, location of where these people will work. It raises questions of First Nations people for immigration, for national security. All of these things need to be considered as part of the transition to net zero. 00:24:02:07 - 00:24:05:04 Oriel Morrison So who's going to pay for this? I mean, this is a costly exercise. 00:24:06:09 - 00:24:39:09 Associate Professor Simon Smart Yeah, that's a really important question. And so we've actually broken down the results of the study down into the domestic system and also the export system, because we modelled both because it's really important to consider both domestic and export emissions as part of this for the domestic system, which, as I mentioned, we suggest that all the results suggest that energy share of GDP need not rise above today's levels despite, you know, unprecedented capital investment as a share of GDP. 00:24:40:01 - 00:25:04:16 Associate Professor Simon Smart The domestic system need not cost more. And so that's the part that would fall on Australians, Australian taxpayers for the export system. This is something that we would probably expect to be locked in through, you know, foreign nations or foreign investors locking in contracts for our energy. And so if they want the energy that Australia can produce, then they'll be the ones that have to pay for it. 00:25:05:14 - 00:25:13:22 Oriel Morrison Okay. Alright. So when you put this into context here, Simon, what is the actual scale of the transformation that's required? 00:25:14:20 - 00:25:40:05 Associate Professor Simon Smart Yeah, it's it's unprecedented is the word that keeps coming to mind and one that I'll probably use a little bit too often. But we are talking for the transition to net zero by 2050, we're talking building electricity generation or renewable electricity generation on the scale of about 40 times what we see in Australia at the moment for the whole electricity system. 00:25:40:18 - 00:25:51:12 Associate Professor Simon Smart So that's around two terawatts of solar and wind that need to get built before 2050. It's just really mind boggling in terms of the numbers. 00:25:51:24 - 00:26:09:01 Oriel Morrison It is unprecedented. That is a great word to be using at this particular point. But when you look at what we need to do in terms of that scale that you've just put forward, where is that change? Where is that growth likely to come from? Where is it likely to be the fastest? 00:26:10:14 - 00:26:40:05 Associate Professor Simon Smart So that's an excellent question. I think that solar, solar PV, you know, large scale solar farms will likely be the winner. They'll be complemented by onshore wind. Offshore wind actually does start to feature in some of our scenarios, particularly as we go out past 23 or 2040 and the costs are expected to come down. The majority of the growth comes in what I'll call a northern or north western sun belt though. 00:26:40:14 - 00:27:07:14 Associate Professor Simon Smart So these are areas across the north of Western Australia. So around the Pilbara there are zones in the Northern Territory and there are a couple of zones in Central Queensland where the economics, the sunlight, you know, the renewable energy resources just come together to provide what at the moment we think looks like the most economically prospective regions to facilitate this massive export industry. 00:27:08:00 - 00:27:29:06 Oriel Morrison Thank you for joining us on APaC Weekly. To stay across the important conversation shaping our future, visit us at APaC network dot com.