Two five is a group of suburbs South Sydney in the postcode two five one five and we wanted to sort of fast forward a community to the future. We are home to the first community led electrification pilot in Australia.
We're going to help five hundred homes in the community electrifying one our hot water.
In a coastal corner of Australia. Scientist Saul Griffith has been quietly working away on a plan to turn five hundred households completely off fossil fuels.
We can do this electrification which will both decarbonize us. It should also lower our cost of energy and it should be able to be all possible with small changes to the local grid and then small changes to people's households. Why would we do that?
An electric home uses less energy, it's cheaper to run, is healthier to live in and best of.
All, if we do it together as a community, it's easier, hopefully a little more fun, and.
We can show the rest of Australia how we can create our electric future today.
And so we ran that project idea up the pole. That Arena Australias Neural Energy Agency arguing for the importance of this in terms of our national emissions and in terms of helping households through this energy transition.
The Albanezi government through Arena is supporting the Electrified two five one five project with a grade of five point four million dollars.
And so we got enough money to provide a small subsidy to a bunch of houses to electrify their stoves, their water heaters, their space heaters. Trying to figure out how to do this cheaper for all of the other communities that they are going to follow, figure out how to do it in fair and equitable way so that we can have a justin fair transition.
And he hopes that what he achieves there can act as a blueprint for the rest of the country. But for that to become a reality, the federal government and industry would need to drastically increase their commitment.
Well, if we were really shooting for a one and a half or two degree climate target, every Australian community would be pretty much fully electrified by early twenty forties. And so we know that if we do this it's going to save the country trillions of dollars. So you know, as well of us wanting to do it for climate reasons. It's just a good idea for the country.
From Schwartz Media. I'm Ruby Jones. This is seven am today, chief scientist at Rewiring Australia. Saw Griffith on the electrification already underway and what both sides of politics are promising for our energy future. It's Tuesday, April twenty two, So Saul zooming out, where would you say that we are at in Australia right now in terms of households moving away from energy generated by fossil fuels to living in a clean electricity environment.
We'd lead the world absolutely in terms of rooftop solar, like thirty five forty percent of homes now I have rooftop solar that probably will go all the way up to eighty percent because it just keeps getting to be cheaper and better economics. Cars we're not going as fast as we could compared to say Norway, where honestly, by the end of twenty twenty five nearly one hundred percent of vehicles will be electric. We are in the middle of the pack on heat pumps for water heating and
space eating. We go about fifty percent at electric cooking. We're doing okay, not quite as good as Asia. So we're doing well and we have this structural advantage now cheap solar, but the long term savings overrunning them for ten or fifteen years on much much cheaper energy is where we save the money. So it's about getting that upfront assistance and that argues for a government's role in helping that.
Let's talk about that a little more. I mean, there is, as you say, this huge uptake in solar. I think it's one in three Australian households that have solar panels now, but it's not the same with batteries. It's one in forty households that have a battery. So in that context, how significant is anthony easiest promise to subsidize home batteries.
A lot of.
People won't remember it, but it was under a Howard government where Howard first encouraged some rebates for solar and some generous feed in tariffs. That was in the early two thousands, and at that time solar was more expensive than it was from the grid. But offering those incentives
it helped build an industry. It helped train the tradees who do the installations, It helped bring the cost of the product down and we're in the same place in twenty twenty five with batteries as we were with solar in say twenty ten, so almost competitive with the market. So these incentives will help build capacity to install them, it will help the electricity distribution companies figure out how to absorb them into the grid, and it will bring
down the cost for every future battery. So by the time this program has run its course, as is the case with solar today, the batteries will make total economic sense and so it looks like good policy, I suppose.
So we're talking a lot about what individuals and what households can do and the ways in which those options might be cheaper, while obviously also coming with the advantage of being better for the environment. But what proportion of emissions in Australia actually come from household use?
So in terms of how significant our household emissions in Australia, I think, first it's worth understanding sixty percent of our emissions are in support of our domestic economy. So that's burning gas in Australia to cook a meal, it's burning petrol, and Australia drive a car burning coal in Australia to use electricity use in Australia. But about forty percent of our emissions is dedicated to things that ultimately we ship
overseas as part of our trade. So that's using diesel to mind coal or diesel to extract gas and then we send that overseas, and so those emissions happen overseas.
So anyway, of the sixty percent of our emissions which are domestic, about forty two percent of those are from the cars in our households and the appliances in our households, and then another thirty percent of our emissions is our cars used in small business and commercially, and in our buildings used for small businesses and commercial activity including schools and churches and surf clubs. They go under the commercial sector.
So seventy percent of our domestic emissions can be addressed with technologies that are available today, solar batteries, electric vehicles, electric appliances. I'm a strong proponent that we should be doing the things that work economically and work for emissions reductions right now, and that's where they are. And if we do that this decade, then we buy ourselves enough time for the remaining pieces of the industrial decarbonization puzzle
to come into focus and to become economically viable. But the reality is we're a big export nation. That's where the very large contribution from industrial emissions happens in Australia is from from the diesel. It's used to pull the coal out of the ground and the natural gas out of the ground and send it off to Asian and European markets. So we need to be, if not first in top runner in the field in all of these
big export industries that use huge amounts of energy. But we're not spending enough money on the research on the new processes. We're not really thinking outside the box, and that's because the industry is a slow moving and heavy hitting lobbyist.
Coming up after the break, what does global leadership actually look like when it comes to facing the climate crisis.
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So in terms of sort of political will, do you see either Dutton or Albanezi's approach as we get closer to this election and the promises that have been made as I suppose being up to meeting the challenge.
Well, the headline the Future Made in Australia is pretty good, you know. The one challenge with Australia is we seem to very much like underwriting the existing market players as opposed to supporting disruptive innovation. So in theory we should all like Future Made in Australia. But if it's large hand oubts to the existing industries to go slow, that's not going to be as good as funding the young, hungry entrepreneurs who want to completely replace those industries with
a better industry. So I'd like to see that happening.
Under the coalition. Energy will become affordable and reliable.
Again using Dutton really hasn't said anything about industrial policy and terms of energy policy. Nuclear that is almost certainly going to be publicly unpopular, isn't going to get in the ground until twenty forty, doesn't solve any real problems that the Australian grid has.
We will join the other nineteen top economies in the world in adopting proven zero missions nuclear power. This is one of the most visionary and necessary policies put forward in our country's history.
I mean, there's some good work. The brag Inquiry on the economics household electrication, which came from Liberals, pointed to the fact that this is good for the country and it's going to save people money. So there's a little bit to celebrate in all teams, But no big industrial vision for the nation from Dunton.
And the only way to drive down power prices quickly is to ramp up domestic gas production and tonight I announce our national Gas Plan.
But you know what we need is genuine political leadership as well as policy. We haven't really seen leading from the top on climate under this labor government. Chris Bam has been good, but the nation would like to hear it from the boss.
Thirty three percent renewable energy on the day we came to office, forty six percent in the last quarter of last year, and renewables are set to overtake coal as the largest source of our electricity this year. That's good progress, but there's more to do, much more to do.
The Independence and Greens are pushing the right things, but we just need to all of it needs to go so much faster than any politician is really conceiving of if we're going to have any hope of keeping the world under two degrees warming.
In his Budget reply speech, Peter Dutton said that he would end labors rewiring the Nation Renewable Energy Focused Fund the nineteen point five billion dollar one in favor of gas, coal and nuclear. So can you just tell me a bit about how that money is currently spent and what would happen if Dunton was to get in and it was cut.
Rewiring the Nation was twenty billion dollars earmarked for big transmission to move electricity long distance across Australia. My understanding is because the transmission companies get paid to build the wise that they've already allocated the great majority of that twenty billion dollars. It's already out the door. So I think Dutton's it's an empty promise. I don't think he
can claw it back at this point. We also understand that one billion of that twenty got reallocated from rewiring the nation towards the HUE, which was the Home Energy Upgrade Fund to do household electrication and similar things. So maybe they could call that back. That would be a bad idea. It would be politically unpopular because it's helping households do things that make their cost a living lower. So feels like an empty threat to me.
Okay. And just finally, as as back on the idea of leadership, you know, we hear a lot about the importance of global leadership when we're talking about climate change, But what type of leadership do you think is actually likely to influence schoolbal change.
Well, the influence that really works is when you prove by example that this is a better way to live. This is the point of the two five to one to five project. And you know, it's pretty cool. We're oversubscribed on households who want to join. It's the I swim in my local swim pool every morning and there's somebody's asking me questions about this or that or the other, and it's sort of you can see it catching on and being a sort of good idea for the community.
So that kind of leadership showing that it can work showing that it improves the economics for community, showing it on the global stage that helps everyone move along. Similarly, I have a friend in New Zealand, Mike Casey. He
runs the world's first all electric cherry farm. He electrified his frost fans, he bought the first two electric tractors in the Southern Hemisphere, put giant amount of solar on his barn, and because of the nature of the electricity tariffs in New Zealand, he's able to I think he's saving forty to seventy thousand dollars a year on his cost of energy because electricity is so much cheaper than
diesel to do the same thing. He's earning an extra twenty or thirty thousand dollars a year selling his excess solar electricity back into the grid. And honestly, that's a
story that could be true for most Australian farmers. There's a huge opportunity in using our existing agricultural rooftops that's barns and sheds, putting solar on those, connecting those into the grid, fixing the regulatory and the electricity market rules so that the farmers get paid the same price as the other generators and then you would have I think you'd have a big change in the politics of electrification in the regions.
You know.
So I look to the Coalition, I look to Done and like, there's a huge opportunity to help your people get on with this energy transition in a way that benefits them economically. So we've got a lot to boast in Australia because agricultural electrication for all but the largest combine harvesters is now a sensible, lower cost way to run farm, all electric households, lowest way to run your household, all electric cars, cheapest cars to run. So the economics
is good. It's going to improve health outcomes. These machines are cheaper and easier to maintain because they've got fewer moving parts. Like, there's just a lot of winning to be had, and leadership is showing that winning happening in practice helping communities. I think with some creativity, our politicians could be speaking to a whole bunch of different constituencies in Australia on how this is going to be economically and culturally and health wise.
Good for you, So thank you so much for your time.
Thank you very much.
Also in the news, today, a Peter Dutton led government would pilot a national register for child sex offenders. The Coalition has announced twelvemonth pilot program would allow parents to apply to police for information about whether an individual who interacts with their children is a convicted sex offender. It's part of the seven hundred and fifty million dollar package
called Operation Safer Communities revealed over the easter break. The plan includes a tightening of border security and safety laws and extra funding for police. The Coalition is expected to focus on issues including national security, crime and defense in the lead up to the election on May three, and Anthony Abernesi has labeled Russia's attempts for a military presence in Indonesia as propaganda, as Moscow's ambassador to Indonesia said,
Australia has no cards to play. As the Coalition continues to demand a briefing on the national security issue that has dominated the past week of the election debate, Senior Labour figures have mocked the request, with Anthony Albenzi saying he's waiting for a briefing on who faked the moon landing and Labour Front bencher Murray Watt comparing the coalition's request to ask for a briefing on the Lochness Monster be joins. This is seven a m. Thanks for listening.