Getting to Zero: Australia's energy transition

Quarterly Essay 81

Alan Finkel

• Publisher: Quarterly Essay
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781743821657
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: Renewable Power Resources
• Index: Technology & Engineering

The world is overheating, and despite good intentions and significant efforts, emissions increase nearly every year. The challenge is immense, but there are solutions.
In this lucid, persuasive essay, Alan Finkel maps Australia's energy transition. He focuses strongly on clean technologies, including the use of hydrogen, and addresses the challenge of intermittent supply. He shows how we can build a zero-emissions world.
Taking into account economics, science and emotions, Getting to Zero is an essential guide to how Australia can tackle the climate crisis with realism and ingenuity.

GETTING TO ZERO	Australia’s Energy Transition
	Alan Finkel

“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”

—Buckminster Fuller

PLANNED OBSOLESCENCE

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.

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 nineteenth-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.

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 underway 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 underway, is different. Electricity from renewable energy (and in some countries from nuclear) 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?

This essay 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. 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 nineteenth-century technology has brought us to an urgent moment in the history of our planet, 21st-century technology will light the way forward.

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.”

GLOBAL WARMING: SOME FACTS

Global warming is real and anthropogenic – caused by humans. Our planet is overheating because of greenhouse gas emissions associated with modern civilisation. The consequence is a changing climate.

This reality is made abundantly clear by temperature graphs. As Figure 1 shows, Australia’s average air temperature has risen 1.4°C since national records began in 1910. And the past decade was hot. Really hot. In fact, a ten-year-old in Australia today has already lived through eight of the hottest years in our recorded history.

Figure 1: Temperature rise since 1910 in Australia

Source: CSIRO and BOM, State of the Climate 2020.

Note: Baseline averaging period is 1960–1991.

Globally, 2020 was equal-hottest, along with 2016 and 2019. The average global temperature was 1.2°C warmer than the pre-industrial (1850–1900) level, closing in on the Paris Agreement’s preferred limit of 1.5°C.

Significant as that warming of the atmosphere is, the biggest heat absorption has been in the oceans. Of the extra heat trapped by the added greenhouse gases, approximately 90 per cent has accumulated in the oceans, owing to their high surface area, low reflectivity, and higher density and heat capacity relative to air.

Changing sea levels confirm the warming of the planet. Over most of the past century, they rose at an average rate of 1.4 millimetres per year. Between 2006 and 2015, this rate increased to 3.6 millimetres per year. The rise in sea levels is attributed partly to the thermal expansion of seawater as it warms, and partly to the net melting of land ice, such as ice sheets and glaciers.

Both theory and experimental physics make the case that the driver of this global warming trend is the increased concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Our understanding of this process dates back almost 200 years, to 1824, when a gifted French mathematician, Joseph Fourier, whose work continues to underpin modern telecommunications, medical imaging and many branches of engineering, asked a simple question: what is regulating Earth’s temperature? Fourier theorised that the atmosphere was keeping the Earth’s surface warm, like the glass windows in a greenhouse – hence the term “the greenhouse effect.”

In 1896, a Swedish chemist named Svante Arrhenius went a step further and determined the underlying physics of global warming. Arrhenius’s explanation was that the visible light from the sun striking the Earth’s surface warms it, and some of the heat is emitted in a different form, known as infrared radiation. Ordinarily, this infrared radiation would escape to space. However, through his lab-bench experiments, Arrhenius found that some gases, including carbon dioxide, trap this infrared radiation and re-emit it in all directions. While some of that re-emitted infrared radiation makes its way back into space, the rest warms the Earth’s atmosphere, surface and oceans beyond their natural levels.

We depend on these greenhouse gases to support all life on Earth. Without them, the Earth would lose so much heat that the average global temperature would be –18°C and life as we know it would be impossible. We humans and other mammals are much happier with the actual average global temperature of 15°C! We are well adapted to this average temperature, so it is a problem when greenhouse gas levels rise because of human activity, trapping too much of the sun’s energy as heat. This is referred to as the “enhanced” greenhouse effect.

To see the trend of the past fifty years, we only have to take a trip to the rugged cliffs of Cape Grim, at the north-western tip of Tasmania. This is an area known for rich soil, abundant rainfall and the roar of strong westerly winds that crash into the coastline after a journey thousands of kilometres across the Indian Ocean. These factors combine to make Cape Grim the perfect place to sample two things: some of the world’s finest beef and some of the world’s most pristine and well-mixed air, which the CSIRO and Bureau of Meteorology began to do in 1976.

The message these air samples carry is indeed grim. There are many greenhouse gases, but the two most significant are carbon dioxide and methane, in that order. As Figure 2 shows, in each of the forty-five years since record-keeping began the carbon dioxide concentration has risen. I’ve often looked at this graph, eagerly hoping to see a downturn. It’s not there. Even the economic hit from the COVID-19 pandemic has not been enough to slow it. The gradient of the atmospheric concentration of methane is more variable than the carbon dioxide curve, but the trend is also upwards.

Figure 2: Carbon dioxide and methane curves at Cape Grim

Source: CSIRO.

The same trend is seen for the past sixty-two years in the measurements from the Mauna Loa Observatory, high on the slopes of Hawaii’s largest volcano. The annual carbon dioxide fluctuations are due to the photosynthetic activity of plants in the Northern Hemisphere, which has more land plants than the Southern Hemisphere. The annual methane fluctuations are due to several factors, including temperature-dependent releases from wetlands.

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A brief digression on carbon dioxide: it is not a pollutant. Calling it a pollutant runs the risk of trivialising the toxic effects of true pollutants. Carbon dioxide is not toxic. It is a product of human metabolism and we exhale it at more than 100 times higher concentration than is found in the atmosphere. In the reverse cycle, plants absorb carbon dioxide to use as the feedstock for photosynthesis. Carbon dioxide is a fundamental part of our lifecycle, but it also happens to be a greenhouse gas.

At the start of the industrial revolution, the concentration of carbon dioxide was 278 parts per million. Today, the concentration is 411 parts per million, a level not experienced for 4 million years. And there is absolutely no hint of a slowdown. Annual carbon dioxide emissions from human activities increased from 24 billion tonnes in 1998 to 37 billion tonnes in 2018. Some who wish it were not so dismiss the measurements of global temperature, carbon dioxide and methane gas as a conspiracy by scientists, journalists, bankers, activists and young people. All I can say on that score is that the notion of a conspiracy of this size and consistency is absurd.

Two other flawed arguments are sometimes offered. The first is that the percentage of carbon dioxide is so small that it couldn’t make a difference. In percentage terms, carbon dioxide is just over 0.04 per cent of the atmosphere. It’s true, that is small, but the physical mechanisms discovered by Arrhenius and many generations of physicists show that it is enough to affect temperature. Take a look beyond Earth and the significance of carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas is readily apparent. Unsurprisingly, the average temperature of the planets in our solar system drops off with distance from the sun. There is one exception: Venus, which, although it is further from the sun than Mercury, is hotter than Mercury because of its predominantly carbon dioxide atmosphere.

In 1896, Arrhenius calculated that if the concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide were doubled, the average temperature would increase by between 5°C and 6°C. The much more intensive analysis done by modern computer modelling puts the impact of doubling at between 2.6°C and 3.9°C.

The second flawed argument is that the increase is natural, and that such increases have happened in the past. Well, not for 4 million years, and never at the incredible pace seen today. Confirmation that the increase is primarily from burning fossil fuels comes from multiple lines of evidence: the decreasing proportion of the Carbon-13 isotope compared with the Carbon-12 isotope in the atmosphere and oceans (because fossil fuels contain proportionately less Carbon-13 than the atmosphere); the observed dominance of these isotopic ratio changes in the Northern Hemisphere, where most fossil fuel emissions occur; a decrease in oxygen in the atmosphere that mirrors the increase in carbon dioxide; and analyses of historical emissions.

This is the message from the overwhelming majority of the evidence, but the science is hefty and at times complex. It is not easy to explain in Senate estimates committee hearings. I recall one exchange with Senator Malcolm Roberts, who asked me in 2017, “Are you aware of Richard Feynman and his quote, ‘A beautiful theory is shot down by an ugly fact?’” As I understood Senator Roberts, he was suggesting that the theory of global warming should be torpedoed by anomalous temperature data that doesn’t match the trend. His quote is actually from Thomas Huxley, who in 1870 delivered an excellent exposition of 200 years of scientific efforts to understand how life is generated, as experiments were devised and refined. Huxley was describing the scientific method in action.

I responded to Senator Roberts with a quote of my own, from Michael Faraday, who (to my imperfect recollection at the time) had said, “I hold my most valued theory at the tips of my fingers so that the most gentle breeze can blow it away.” Faraday’s point was that a fundamental of science is that if a contradictory fact appears, you must question and check your theory, and, if necessary, be prepared to discard it and come up with a better one. Scientific theories are validated or disproved by experiments, and good theories stand up to repeated and varied experiments. That doesn’t mean every single experiment or every single data point will agree. But a theory becomes more robust the more experiments that are done and the more datasets that support it. It becomes the best theory we have in answer to a specific problem, within a certain degree of probability. And so a consensus develops. This is the scientific method.

The theory that the global temperature is warming due to human activity is so extensively supported by theory, laboratory experiments and reams of data that it can be considered incontrovertible. That doesn’t mean the temperature next year can be accurately predicted. Just as for the weather forecast, there is variability. But the trends are predictable, and when we look at trends rather than individual measurements we find no ugly facts to slay the theory of global warming. Despite scientists being prepared to let go if there is a breath of contrary fact, there has been no need to do so.

Unfortunately, it does not take a lot of warming for our climate to be affected, and no nation is immune. Indeed, many nations that contribute the least are facing the most serious consequences. Because ocean currents and major wind patterns respond to warming, a temperature rise of just 1°C can cause major disruptions to the natural systems that regulate our climate, as predicted by the increasingly sophisticated computer models used to construct future scenarios.

The accuracy of any model depends on the sophistication of the algorithms and the quality of the data. When models are used to extrapolate into the future using simple algorithms and poor datasets, they can lead to implausible predictions, as we saw in the early days of modelling the COVID-19 pandemic. The accuracy of the pandemic modelling improved markedly as scientists developed more soph...