Underneath all the noise of daily news a revolution is quietly gathering pace in Australia, transforming lives and economies. And its leadership comes from the unlikeliest places: accountancy school, retail sales, and a government agency.
In 2012 Julia Gillard’s government set up the Australian Renewable Energy Agency, which took on the shorthand title of ARENA. In common usage that means a place of action, where people are tested and winners decided, and it’s not a bad analogy for ARENA.
Last month Michael Liebreich, the British founder of Bloomberg New Energy Finance and for decades a world leader in marketing sustainable development, sat down in Sydney with ARENA’s CEO, Darren Miller, to talk about the agency’s rise to global prominence in the rollout of renewable energy.
Their hour-long conversation (you can find it on YouTube) was a real eye-opener. Illuminated by Liebreich’s own deep knowledge and experience of the ups and downs of renewables, the conversation unwrapped the story of ARENA from its early uncertain years under sceptical political leadership to now, as Australia’s energy revolution ramps up.
Both Miller and Liebreich take a really positive view of the future of clean energy, an example that’s a lesson to this non-expert who in recent times has felt anything but positive at the spectacle of one obstacle after another being thrown in the path of progress.
Last week on returning to the UK Liebreich told a British audience that those obstacles are just fossil energy’s attempt to claw back support in the face of relatively cheap solar and wind. That cost differential, he said, is glaringly obvious in countries in the global South where oil and gas don’t have the benefit of government subsidies.
This is beginning to have an impact in Australia, where electricity from renewable sources is already undercutting gas power on cost. Following ARENA-funded research that has already raised solar cell efficiency and promises to go much further, Miller is confident that the cost of generating and storing solar energy will be lowered dramatically in coming years.
More efficient solar cells, with Australian-invented “PERC” and “TOPCON” cells leading the way, have been able to unlock lower cost right along the supply chain all the way to the end user, said Miller. “We shouldn’t underestimate what efficiency does for the economics of solar.”
Having trained as an accountant, Miller was in rooftop solar and electricity retailing before being appointed ARENA CEO by the Turnbull government. On coming to power Labor kept him on while raising ARENA’s grants pool to develop innovative technologies to $14 billion over 20 years.
That’s when things really started humming. On top of its solar success, Australia has become the global leader in rolling out batteries for households, communities and grid management, with an installed energy capacity per person over double that of its nearest competitor Germany.
“I like to think of ARENA as a benevolent equity investor,” Miller told Liebreich. “We have the mindset of an equity investor… but ultimately we want to give our money to a project… We’re not investing working capital in a company; we’re investing in an experiment [in] something that’s not yet taken up by the commercial market.”
ARENA’s core function, and a stand-out feature of its business, is knowledge-sharing. “We don’t want to be funding the same mistakes over and over,” Miller told Liebreich. Each funded project has to share its research findings, to speed development times and ensure good ideas get to the market in the fastest possible time.
That principle of information-sharing extends beyond national borders. So new solar panels using those advanced cells invented by a University of NSW team under eminent physicist Martin Green didn’t get to be made here but in China, which can deliver them at a fraction of what it would cost here.
Outsourcing that manufacturing to China is of less concern to Miller than growing ideas. In developing EV charging, for instance, ARENA would bring together a dozen or so project teams together in a room for two days, “and they get to talk to each other and open up about what they’ve done… a core part of the knowledge-sharing work that we do”.
Fresh from from his Australian visit, Liebreich told a UK audience last week that “the great clean energy acceleration” was transforming energy economics, pushing gas aside as the electricity price-setter and bringing prices down. “Suddenly we’re in a different world, at a cusp, an inflection point… Zero marginal cost generation. Incredibly disruptive. Blows up price formation.”
Miller and Liebreich are clean energy crusaders who walk the talk, whose words carry the ring of conviction and are well supported by evidence. And they’re far from alone, more of which next week.