Season 2, Episode 6: Andrew Blakers, Australian National University
In the first episode back after our mid-season break, Torsten reconnects with Andrew Blakers, who he studied under at the Australian National University back in the nineties.
Andrew is a true trailblazer in renewable energy and a developer and fierce advocate for solar technology. This episode explores Andrew’s journey from a student of physics at UNSW to renewable energy visionary.
With a blend of both sunny optimism and biting realism, Andrew offers insights into the challenges and opportunities in the global renewable energy transition, including advocating for the adoption of pumped hydro energy storage, which he believes has vast potential. As he explains, “We are going to end up with a much more reliable energy system that’s also cheaper and has zero emissions.” His perspective sheds light on why a distributed clean energy network represents a "quiet revolution" of the energy system in countries like Australia.
Don’t miss this thought-provoking episode to hear Andrew’s hot takes on topics ranging from grid stability to the misconceptions surrounding hydrogen and nuclear power.
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Show Notes:
Andrew’s early inspiration to move from physics to renewable energy
The journey to Australia’s 82% renewable target by 2030
The runaway success of rooftop solar and its role in decarbonizing Australia
Insights into grid stability and resilience through distributed energy
Pumped hydro as a game-changer in energy storage
Myths surrounding nuclear energy and hydrogen in the energy mix
The importance of keeping solar growth steady to achieve global decarbonization
Transcript
[00:02:13.160] - Torsten
Welcome, Andrew.
[00:02:48.170] - Andrew
Thank you, Torsten.
[00:02:49.130] - Torsten
Yeah, at this point, right in the beginning, I want to add that from 1993 onwards, for around 13 months or so, I did my Diplomarbeit, the back then German equivalent to a master thesis, with Andrew Blakers at the Australian National University.
This was a formative time for me at the beginning of my solar career, and I often look back and it gives me a big smile also today after 30 years. This is not only because I got to see wallabies on my regular run up Black Mountain, just behind my student dormitory, but of course, because I learned so much from Andrew. So again, Andrew, thanks so much for giving me the chance back then.
[00:03:29.440] - Andrew
It was great to have you.
[00:03:30.710] - Torsten
What comes to your mind when you think of 1994 and me being at your institute? I think you just started your department.
[00:03:38.020] - Andrew
I spent 10 years or 11 years at the University of New South Wales in the group of Martin Green. And then in late 1991, I came to ANU and spent a year or so stepping up my laboratory and then gathering money. Of course, money is what makes the whole thing work. I spend a lot of time looking for money, and I was fortunate to find sufficient to keep the group going, and it still flourishes today.
[00:04:05.480] - Torsten
When was your start into solar? And back then, did you imagine witnessing the energy transition that we are seeing now in terms of costs and level of deployment of solar and wind?
[00:04:15.710] - Andrew
I did physics and maths at the Australian National University, and I was going to be an astronomer. And then I took up walking in national parks and wilderness areas and realized that my background will be much better used for solar energy. It was completely obvious that greenhouse was going to be a major, major problem. The only question was how fast the damage would occur and whether we could forestall most of the damage.
Back in 1979, of course, I couldn't foresee the ins and outs, but I went to the University of New South Wales, and I was a second PhD student of Professor Martin Green. I did my PhD there and three or four post-docs and spent a substantial amount of time there working on high performance silicon solar cells. I decided right back then that crystalline silicon was the path to large scale solar. In fact, the path to large scale energy. This has proved to be absolutely correct. Never bet against silicon.
[00:05:17.200] - Torsten
We'll come to your contribution to technology and why silicon is the best a bit later. Let's focus for the start on what's happening right now in Australia. What can you tell us about the transition in place and the progress towards the 80% renewals by 2030 target in Australia?
[00:05:36.590] - Andrew
Australia has a federal government with support from all of the state governments that is aiming for a rapid change to high levels of solar and wind in its electricity system. The prime motivation for this is a very unpleasant situation in 2022 and 2021 as well, during the Russian invasion of Ukraine, when energy prices went very high. Basically, a decision was made that we will never place ourselves at the mercy of international prices for gas and coal again. The way to do that is to move rapidly to solar and wind for electricity production.
The federal government has a policy of reaching 82% renewables by 2030. We're currently at 41%. No very great difficulties are seen in doubling our solar and wind over the next six years. It's introduced something called the Capacity Investment Scheme, which basically sets floor and ceiling prices for companies to bid for solar and wind. Then once the companies have had a bid accepted, they have a clear risk mitigation process, but also in the sense that if the prices of energy ever go high, the government will call back some of the money that was perhaps expended to avoid prices falling too low for these developers.
In a nutshell, we are going to end up with a rapid move to 82% pretty much locked in, provided that the government does not change at the next election, which is held next year.
[00:07:12.720] - Torsten
Is there across the, let's say, population and all across the party a common goal to reach that, or do you think that with a change in government, this target could be scrapped?
[00:07:23.170] - Andrew
Because energy is primarily a state function and the Commonwealth role is more coordination, a change of government to a hostile government, which is possible in May next year, would lead to a delay, but not a stop to the rapid move towards solar and wind. We had a hostile government for 10 years, and because we have an open market, anyone can connect the state government's more or less run energy. That didn't stop Australia becoming the global renewable energy pathfinder.
[00:07:54.670] - Torsten
Talking about the pathfinder, rooftop solar in Australia has been a runaway success story. Almost one in three homes have a rooftop PV system. Can you imagine that a saturation point will arrive at some point and deployment slow?
[00:08:08.820] - Andrew
We've barely started on our rooftop solar. One in three homes have rooftop solar. That will probably go to two in three. We've barely started in the commercial space for warehouses and factories and shopping centers and car parks. We could easily end up with two, three, even four times as much annual energy generation from rooftops as we currently drive. I think that we'll end up with something like a quarter of our electricity coming from rooftops after we completely decarbonize, meaning that we use clean electricity to get rid of fossil fuels out of transport, heating, industry, and aviation fuels.
[00:09:02.790] - Torsten
For some time we've heard, also in Germany, there was the saying 20-30 years ago, we've heard that grid operators and utilities were one of instability with large amounts of rooftop PV, or in general, distributed energy generation, fluctuating energy generation.
In some Australian state capitals, I understand that there are times when 100% of the state's electricity demand is supplied by rooftop PV. What are you seeing in terms of system instability?
[00:09:14.300] - Andrew
These prognostications are garbage. That's a technical term. I'll translate for you. Nonsense, wrong, demonstrably wrong, completely and totally irrelevant. When it's come to Australia, anyone who believes that high levels of solar wind, rooftop, solar destabilizes your grid. Well, it can happen if you do nothing to avoid that destabilization. But if you take the steps that the Australian energy market operator and various other bodies in Australia take, then it does not destabilize your grid.
So recently, about a year ago in South Australia, the entire state derived sufficient electricity from rooftop solar to meet all of its demand. South Australia is weekly connected through transmission to the Eastern States, and it has a small amount of compulsory gas generation for system stability. That small amount of gas generation goes down every year as the system operator learns that it's less and less required, and as more and more storage enters the system and as interconnection to the Eastern States becomes stronger.
So the take home message is if you plan for it and work for it and do the basic modification to the way the system operates, rooftop solar will not destabilize your grid. Quite the contrary, we are going to end up with a far more robust and reliable energy system than we had when we had fossil fuels.
And this is very simple to demonstrate. In the old days, we had a dozen large coal and gas power stations. If you lose one of them from a fire, you can lose 10% of your generation inside a second. We are going to end up with millions of rooftop systems and thousands of solar farms and wind farms and a network of transmission going everywhere and millions of batteries and dozens of pump hydro systems and very sophisticated demand management. So the possibility that an accident or a deliberate act of sabotage or any other thing could destabilize your electricity system becomes vanishingly small. No weather is even capable of doing this because weather takes several days to cross from West to East. So you can see the weather coming for days, even weeks in advance. So you will not be surprised. The upshot of this is we are going to end up with a much more reliable energy system that's also cheaper and has zero emissions.
[00:11:53.480] - Torsten
At the core is the modularity, so that you have this distributed modular energy generation system rather than monopolies in single spots. That's wonderful.
[00:12:04.200] - Andrew
Instead of a few transmission lines to a few power stations, any one of which could go down, you have a network. Everyone knows that networks are more stable than hub and spoke.
[00:12:13.050] - Torsten
Talking about monopolies. I've seen this was also a debate about nuclear energy in Australian politics. Of course, globally, solar and wind is searching past nuclear in terms of capacity additions and even generation.
How do you see the nuclear discussion playing out in Australia?
[00:12:29.510] - Andrew
It's a stalkning horse for gas. The fossil fuel industry has very strong connections into conservative politics. I don't think anyone who looks at this for five minutes reaches any conclusion other than nuclear has missed the boat. Put it in perspective, last year, the world did about 500 gigawatts of new solar and wind and zero net new gigawatts of nuclear. The nuclear capacity around the world and nuclear generation has been static for the last dozen years and shows no sign of increasing. So solar capacity passed nuclear capacity in 2017, both solar and wind will have passed nuclear generation around 2027, and then we'll just zoom away.
In Australia, there is no nuclear energy. It's just ludicrous to imagine that we're going to set up a fast nuclear apparatus to run nuclear power stations. But waving around nuclear power stations, talking about them means that a future conservative government might argue that, Oh, we're just going to have gas running for another 10 years, and then the nuclear will be ready. It is a stalking horse for gas. It is not a serious proposition that we're going to build nuclear.
[00:13:39.530] - Torsten
Yeah, I think the same in the US and also Germany just turned off the last nuclear reactors two years ago or so, or one year ago. Again, the conservative parties claimed that this was a big mistake, even though they actually decided 10 years ago to go this way.
Have you ever understood why always conservative parties tend to support the nuclear gas industry? You could think that they are the ones when it's about conserving, conserving nature, they should be the one who go another way.
[00:14:08.820] - Andrew
Well, conservative parties have a terrible record on conservation and environment. There's a deep negative perception that solar and wind are somehow leftist technologies that's practically communist. It's going to destabilize their mates who run the fossil fuel industry.
It's not a lot different to the demise of cigarette advertising around the world. It's been very obvious for the last 60, 80, even 100 years that cigarettes are bad for your health. So that smoking industry conducted a very successful rear guard action, and it was primarily the conservative parties that aided and abetted that rear guard action. So this other smoking industry, named the Fossil Fuels, is adopting exactly the same playbook and will attempt to have a rear guard action. And they're relatively successful. The only problem for them is that the cost of wind, and in particular, solar, just keeps going down.
[00:15:05.460] - Torsten
I think it's interesting to observe Texas, which is, in a way, you could say a conservative state, but they let almost free market rule the energy market. There you see a gigantic growth of solar. I think that's a fantastic example how solar and wind just also beat anything else in a really free market, right?
[00:15:25.480] - Andrew
When you have an open market, you have price discovery. The price discovery is that solar and wind are cheaper than everything else. Australia is number one for seaborne coal exports and number three, I think, or two for liquefied natural gas seaborne exports. We have a very large fossil fuel mafia in Australia. Through an accident of history, we ended up with an open electricity market. Anybody who meets technical specifications can connect in, whether it's a rooftop solar or a large solar and wind farm. And through 10 years of hostile, conservative government, these pesky companies and these annoying individuals just kept connecting.
Australia ended up as the global renewable energy pathfinder. We have more solar generation per person than in the other country. We're very good for wind as well. And importantly, the other top dozen countries for per capita solar and wind are all in Europe who share electricity across national boundaries. But in Australia, we have to go it alone. And we are demonstrating that it's really remarkably straightforward.
[00:16:32.060] - Torsten
Talking about going alone, what do you think of the AA PowerLink project, which targets to power substantially Singapore, I think up to 10 or 15% of their electricity consumption, with a 20 gigawatt TV system in Australia's national northern territory and a 5,000 kilometer long DC subsea cable? Actually, Australia would turn into an exporter of electricity.
[00:16:57.710] - Andrew
The problem for this system is It's a 4,000 or 5,000 kilometer long cable, which is five or six times longer than any other undersea cable in the world. It has to traverse the Timor Trench, which is about 1.9 kilometers of depth, which is utterly unprecedented for an undersea cable. Above all, it has to compete with Sumatra in Indonesia, which is 50 kilometers away across the shallow sea from Singapore, and Borneo, Sarawak, for example, the state of Malaysia in Borneo, which is 700 kilometers away across the shallow sea. Both those jurisdictions are very keen to supply to Singapore and peninsula Malaysia, and can produce electricity at a price that's fully competitive with what Australia can do without the incredibly long, incredibly deep clay cable.
I think the SunCable proposal is gradually turning itself around. A lot of people have said, Well, build this enormous solar and wind up in the north center of Australia. Supply Darwin, which is on the way to Singapore, but just stop there and send the rest of the energy south, where most Australians live.
[00:18:10.790] - Torsten
But it's mind boggling, right, that these projects and these ideas, these concepts come up, I think that's a good indicator of where we are, how far we've gotten.
[00:18:19.880] - Andrew
Yes and no. There's been large numbers of large projects announced, and the number that actually is built is not necessarily all that large. Most of the clean hydrogen projects are falling over one by one because of just mind bogglingly bad economics.
[00:18:35.960] - Torsten
I wasn't about to touch base on hydrogen, but now that you raised that topic, do you want to comment on what's going on with hydrogen?
[00:18:50.220] - Andrew
Okay, so the chemical symbol for hydrogen is H, and of course, H actually stands for Hype. I've been around in solar for long enough to remember three or four hydrogen hype episodes, and we are just coming off the back of about the fourth of them. People discover hydrogen – "Oh, you can do all sorts of things with hydrogen." Well, that's perfectly true. But almost always, you can do that thing better by some other way.
In a nutshell, hydrogen has almost no part to play in the energy system. But in the chemical system, you need lots and lots of hydrogen atoms, and that's where clean hydrogen will come. That's a job for the 2030s and the 2040s, to decarbonize production of ammonia and metals and synthetic aviation, shipping fuels, ceramics, plastics. It's not a job for the 2020s. Our job in the 2020s is to decarbonize electricity and land transport. Then in the 2030s, we can move on to looking seriously at the chemical industry. But hydrogen has no part in the energy industry. You're better off when you make clean electricity, just keeping it as electricity.
[00:19:57.440] - Torsten
I saw a concept, or I actually it's called motor cycles with an hydrogen engine. Same for trams, which is ridiculous because they have always been electrified. Then with trains, et cetera. It's amazing, the hype around it.
[00:20:12.830] - Andrew
I stay far away from hydrogen. Because you look at it for a few minutes and you realize this is nonsense. For the basic dynamics, the dreadful round trip efficiency of turning clean solar and wind into clean hydrogen and then compressing it and shipping it and then turning it back into electricity or transport fuel with a round trip efficiency of maybe 30%. When if you just keep it all as electricity, the problem goes away.
[00:20:40.120] - Torsten
Let's move to something that I think makes sense. I know that you've been active in trading the Global Pumped Hydro Atlas. Can you tell us how that works and who was involved?
[00:20:52.130] - Andrew
Okay, so about 95% of all the energy storage for the electricity industry is pumped hydro. Everything else together is the last 5 %, and that's not going to change anytime soon.
[00:21:03.430] - Torsten
So that's for Australia?
[00:21:05.430] - Andrew
The world.
In Australia, there's a pump hydro system called Snow 2.0, which is under construction and it's larger than all of the utility batteries in the whole world put together several times. The pump hydro is basically pumping water uphill between two reservoirs when it's sunny and windy, and when when you need the energy back, like the middle of the night, the water comes back down through the turbine to recover the energy. The round trip efficiency is about 80 %. You put in 100 units of energy to push the water uphill, and you get back about 80 units. For a battery, you get back maybe 90 units. So they're both pretty high efficiency compared with hydrogen, which you'd get back only 30 units.
But almost all pump hydro systems in the world are on rivers in conjunction with existing hydroelectric systems. We wondered, well, rivers are about 1% of the global landscape. What about the other 99%? So we did a high resolution survey of the entire world at a horizontal resolution of about 30 meters and a vertical resolution of about one meter. And we found 820,000 good sites with a combined total of about 86 million gigawatt-hours.
So to put this in perspective, this is the same amount of energy as the electricity potential storage the world produces in three years. It is also equivalent to about a thousand billion, a trillion electric vehicle batteries. So if you want serious energy storage, there's only really one option, and that's pumped hydro. And it's an extremely good option because it's off the shelf, cheap, mature, highly engineered, highly understood, financeable, 100-year-life energy storage technology. So the future of energy storage is solved. Overnight storage is simply not an issue for most places in the world. And it's basically batteries for short-term storage of seconds up to hours and pump hydro for hours to days. Almost all parts of the world have unlimited pump hydro, actually, except for Northern Europe, which is where you're located. At the north of the Alps, there's not much opportunity.
[00:23:33.190] - Torsten
What do we do? Turn off the lights at night?
[00:23:36.200] - SAndrew
No, not at all. I'll explain how Europe energy system will go unless Europe planners are nuts. Just to carry on one moment further, you can find our Pump Hydro Atlas. You can zoom into all 820,000 sites by just googling for ANU, Pump Hydro, Global Atlas. You can zoom and pan and tilt and rotate and get 26 items of information in pop-ups for every one of the 800,000 sites around the world, including sites in your backyard. And they're colour-coded for cost, ranging from Class E, which is good, but not very good, up to Class A. And then we have the premium classes at AA and AA. And there's a factor of 10 difference in the cost of a pump hydro that's Triple A rated compared with Class E rated. So there's a very wide range of sizes from 2 up to 5,000 gigawatt-hours, so extremely wide range. Two gigawatt-hours is where batteries leave off. 5,000 gigawatt-hours is 2,000 very large batteries and is suitable for about 80 million or 100 million people.
Europe is slightly nuts. I read so many articles about how can we make sure that France or Germany or Britain or some other country can become 100% renewables.
Well, with difficulty, but you all live in Europe, and it is completely obvious that a European-wide transmission network is required. So that means that strong interconnection must cross the Alps, north to south and east to west. You would end up with a system that basically harvests mind bogglingly large amounts of electricity from extraordinarily good wind offshore in the Baltic and North Sea and Irish Sea, and sends that electricity south across the Alps to meet solar energy coming from the south to the north. There's one other quirk. Europe has very large scale off-river pump hydro potential in the south. The Alps is restricted both because it's too steep and because of national parks. But the Balkans has very large scale potential pump hydro, which you can see clearly and easily if you go and look at the pump hydro atlas.
[00:26:05.900] - Torsten
What's the next option next to a pump hydro?
[00:26:09.640] - Andrew
What else do you need? Batteries take care of short-term storage. Pump hydro takes care of overnight and longer term storage. The important thing is both together are much better than either separately. The reason is that pump hydro is relatively expensive for power, but very cheap for energy, whereas batteries is the opposite. If you have both, you end up with a low energy and low power cost. I think this is a very important point that energy overnight storage is really a solved problem.
The cost of large scale off-river pump hydro is in the vicinity of $20 US dollars per kilowatt hour. So this is less than one-tenth the cost of an equivalent battery. The cost of pump hydro is extraordinarily low. The Snow 2.0 system under construction in Australia that I mentioned comes in at $23 per kilowatt hour, and it's not a particularly good site by world standards.
[00:27:09.410] - Torsten
Let's move on to, let's say, solar policy, the generation part. There has been the debate about the dominance of China in terms of the PV manufacturing supply chain. Also, there's a large activities in Europe, Germany, for example, to bring back manufacturing locally. India is making big moves towards that, and the US is also trying, the initial successes can be seen. What are you thinking in this regard?
[00:27:42.840] - Andrew
What a waste of time. China makes most of the world's solar panels. It is a non-issue, and I'll explain why. When we have brought everybody up to the same living standard as Europe or Australia or the United States, then the per capita electricity electricity consumption will be about 10 megawatt-hours per person per year. We need to double that in order to decarbonize transport heating in industry, maybe even a bit more than that.
We end up with 20 megawatt-hours per person per year for 10 billion affluent people. That's 200,000 terawatt-hours per year is the global electricity production requirement. You could do the whole job with about 100 terawatts of solar. You'd build that over a period of 25 and replace it over a period of 25 years. You've got to divide that 100 terawatts by 25. That's 4 terawatts per year of solar panels will be sold. The current wholesale price is 12 US cents per watt? It'll fall to 10 or 8. And so the upper bound on the global market for solar panels is about 400 billion per year US. And that is seven times smaller than the global car our industry and is a tiny, tiny fraction of the global gross domestic product.
It turns out that it's $40 per person per year to buy solar panels to continually replace their existing solar panels. Industry size can never be large. And this is another way of saying that solar panels are so cheap, and they're going to get even cheaper. Now we come to the so-called risk. Suppose that for any reason, pandemic, politics, war, whatever, China turned off solar panel production tomorrow. The existing solar panels continue to operate. It would be an inconvenience. The other parts of the world would need to build their own solar panel manufacturing. But there's nothing intrinsic about China. Anyone can build a solar panel manufacturing factory, perhaps at a slightly higher price. The price is so low, that's neither in or there.
Compare that with getting your coal, oil, and gas turned off today, you would know about that within a week or two. You're talking about years of forewarning that we have a problem and we better build our solar cell factories compared with weeks of, Oh, dear, what are we going to do? We've just lost our coal, oil, and gas supply. I find it quite remarkable that people who make these statements don't sit down and do the calculation.
It takes about 10 minutes to work out the upper bound size of the global solar panel industry. Four hundred billion US per year, upper bound. It can never be larger than that.
[00:30:31.820] - Torsten
That's what I always like when I was a student at university, you always came up with very simple calculations on the direction of things. Rather than making them complicated, you are a master in making things simple. That was another cool example, thanks.
Still, there are numerous policy measures, and I think there was a legislation passed very recently in Australia to incentivize solar manufacturing. I guess you think that's wasted money or can this somehow be well spent?
[00:31:05.220] - Andrew
It could be well spent. There's no reason that all the manufacturing has to be in China. But when you've got an integrated ecosystem, industrial ecosystem as China has, it's pretty hard to compete. However, it is perfectly feasible that you could produce panels in other countries with a cost premium that's tolerable, 10, 20, 30, 40%.
And some some countries, for geopolitical reasons, such as India, might decide to do solar panel manufacturing in a big way. So if there is really a desire to diversify away from China, my suggestion would be go and talk to the Indians.
[00:31:46.540] - Torsten
Andrew, we're coming to the end. My classic last question is, what do you think does it take to get solar, and that includes wind or all the renewables, to the next level? What's that's the big thing that needs to be solved?
[00:32:01.880] - Speaker 2
It's not why they realized that we need about 100 terawatts of solar to completely decarbonize the world. That's removing fossil fuels from every corner of the global economy. Initially, getting it out of electricity production, then using clean electricity to remove fossil fuels from transport heating in industry, and then using clean electricity to create clean hydrogen, clean carbon for all of the chemical industry.
So 100 terawatts of solar. It turns out that if we keep growing the solar industry over the next 20 years, as fast as we're currently growing it, we get to 100 terawatts. So my number one requirement is to keep growing at 20-odd % per year. Just double every three years, come back in seven years, it's two to the power of seven, which is a very large number, and we have decarbonized the wealth.
[00:32:56.150] - Torsten
Wonderful finish. Andrew, thank you so much. You're all about details, but also about the big picture. I think that's a fantastic skill you have there. Thanks so much. All the best. Stay in touch. Hopefully not another 20 years or so.
[00:33:10.320] - Andrew
Okay. Thank you very much, Torsten.
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