I’ve spent this week in Australia, which has been a fascinating insight into how they shape and run their economy, what energy transition means to them.
Decarbonisation of industrial economies, like Australia, is in the hard-to-reach space. For homes, services, and light businesses there appears to be a path to decarbonisation. But for mining, heavy manufacturing, large scale production lines there is no easy answer.
These operations need to run 24x7, regardless of the amount of sun and wind. Storage isn’t cheap, so the reality is that energy needs to be constantly provided to operate at an industrial scale. There aren’t easy choices here – stick with coal, more gas, nuclear…?
The nature of our economy is the largest driver of emissions. We can get very excited about the percentage of renewables in our electricity mix, but our hard-to-abate emissions are generated from the fossil fuels used directly in industry. We must solve this problem to achieve NZC.
People, businesses, and governments need to make choices about what type of economy they want to operate. Here in Australia this debate is raging – should they regrow their manufacturing base, should they remain focussed on natural resources, what is the high-tech and services opportunity.
What would you do? Should Australia continue to be the world’s natural resources mine, and what should change?
