Welcome to our newsletter on how to accelerate the ESG and net zero transition in the built environment.
The government on Thursday conceded we are not going to meet our renewable energy targets of 82 per cent by 2030. And announced it would try to remedy that problem by directly funding more of the programs we need to make the transition happen.
It’s about time.
Normally we’d also say it’s it about time to focus on the built environment and drastically reduce the demand for clean green energy so that we get to the same place but via a different route.
And there’s also the view the government should never have gotten out of supplying one of the most important resources we need for our economy, wellbeing and productivity – electricity.
What were they thinking?
As we understand it the fundamental underlying premise of a private company in the semi-capitalist oligarchical world we live in – is to maximise profits and push all other competitors under the carpet or out the window if possible.
It is not to share and care and make sure we are all equitably supplied with a resource – natural, humane or otherwise.
We can live with privatised telcos. But in things like water and energy it’s an appalling idea.
In days gone by, the paternalistic nature of governments came in handy. They had a mandate to do the best they could for their brood. And it was something they did through independent government agencies that more or less by-passed the democratic process because they took the long view.
Now that we need to switch to renewable energy – at speed and at scale – we are flailing around at the mercy of a disaggregated privatised system where the community is same: democratised, politicised and organised – and where every little YIMBY is sacred.
Placed in the wrong hands, this ostensible and naïve “good” of democracy and empowerment can turn around and bite those hands off.
Suddenly you have Peter Dutton claiming to love whales. And that offshore windfarms will kill them.
Since when?
Clearly Dutton is now channelling his new mentor and champion of humanity’s underbelly Donald Trump who, despite absolutely no evidence at all, goes about as a born again whale-hugger and pointing the finger of scorn and shame at greenies who are killing these beautiful creatures by insisting on clean energy.
That it’s not true, that there is no evidence at all that a windfarm has ever murdered a whale is irrelevant.
In a rare moment that The Fifth Estate recently managed to catch a snippet of live to air television news recently we thought we’d flipped to the Scandi Noir channel by mistake – at the sight of a huge group of enthusiastic, smug and clearly “greener than green greenies” gathered on a headland at Wollongong to protest the prospect of a wind farm off the coast.
So Trump repeats over and over whatever he likes until others make it an incontestable truism.
Like the world is flat. Or that it was built in a day.
Scientist Tim Flannery bowled over an auditorium in the very early days of TFE when he said that in the US 30 per cent of people think the world is flat – and was built in seven days.
We checked what the current numbers were running at.
A recent YouGov poll found that only around two-thirds of Americans aged between 18 and 24 believe that the Earth is round.
And 40 per cent believe in creationism.
Flannery’s advice as to what to do with that information was, absolutely nothing. Walk away.
But we can no longer walk away.
These flat earthers are powerful and they might retake the White House.
An even worse revelation is the simple one that most people are selfish. This, from a millennial not so long ago should not have bowled us over, but it did. We were hoping for better because we think they were self-referencing their tribe.
So we’ve got people saying – “I’m a greenie, but no transmission lines through my property… because, because, because…I want to save the animals and the biodiversity.”
Well, sometimes there’s a cost of the small to save the big. Which does not mean we are heartless selfish proponents of clean energy over all other rightful claims to a humane and balanced existence, but that we are running out of time.
The feds would do well to sacrifice some of its ideology to appease the privatising ideologues to save the rest of us.
It would do well to look to Victoria and it0s re-establishment of the State Electricity Commission – which is now actually it’s already back – announced in October.
But instead came the news of more capacity investment/incentive. Always incentive. Never a stick. “Poor us, we’re so fragile – we need only stars no crosses.”
Now there’s another way to win this battle and maybe it appeals to both the common good, and selfish tendencies.
One of our smart contributors (more wanted please!) Philippa England from Griffith University did what we love best. She grabbed a problem, turned it on its head and solved it.
In her excellent piece this week she pointed to the slow traction we’ve got on large scale renewable energy projects and said, essentially, that if this doesn’t work, try that.
“Rooftop solar, local batteries and bi-directional charging can power our cities and our cars with spare left over for the grid,” she writes.
“The more we invest in these distributed energy resources (otherwise known as CER or Consumer Energy Resources) the fewer transmission lines, wind farms and utility scale solar farms will be required.”
She points out this is a solution that’s easy, equitable and fast.
We now have 3.5 million rooftops generating over 20 GW of solar power. That’s more than four times the current capacity of Snowy Hydro, she says.
And even better she cites. The Clean Energy Finance Corporation’s report on Australia’s solar rooftop potential that says rooftop solar in Australia is 179 gigawatts, “producing an annual energy output of 245 terawatt-hours – a grand 56 terawatt hours over and above our total grid consumption for 2022.”
Maybe this doesn’t meet the objective of the privatised energy providers, but at least the whales will be safe.