If technology is the answer to everything, it had better work

Andrew Forrest is calling for more government funding but when will hydrogen become practicable? Picture: Annabel Moeller

How great is technology! It is going to deliver us from the evils of climate change and bring about net zero at 2050 or before.

If this is to happen, technology needs to be fit for purpose and fit for purpose at scale. If not, put simply Joe Public will not hack it. This is true for electric vehicles, ambitious promises on hydrogen, or carbon capture and storage and even on what seaweed can do to stop cattle from burping out greenhouse gas.

This week, The Australian ­reported that Andrew Forrest is lobbying the government to withdraw diesel subsidies and soup up hydrogen funding. Yet no one is firm on when hydrogen will ­become practicable.

The Morrison government knows this, which is why it is promising as little as possible. ­Instead it insists the Australian way is to under-promise and that technology will over-deliver.

Exhibit A on a technology shift that could easily either backfire or fall over is the UK government’s demand that homes should ­replace their oil or gas heaters with electric heat pumps by 2035.

An air source heat pump is more energy efficient than a gas boiler. It works like a fridge in ­reverse, using electricity to extract energy from the outside air to provide heating and hot water. Timed perfectly just ahead of COP26, the message for unsuspecting Brits was this won’t hurt a bit.

Yet the whole project is as risible as pink batts. First, unless you live in a new build super insulated home in the UK, preferably with underfloor heating, heat pumps are not warm enough. They take far longer to heat up than gas heaters. So, in the vast majority of homes, from 17th century Oxfordshire cottages to Coronation Street and across the North, ­people will be cold.

Next, the UK government’s subsidy for families to transition is £5000 ($9260). The total cost is £10,000. Homes will probably need to replace radiators with larger ones. And, unless government intervenes, homeowners will not save money from the shift as electricity is far more expensive than gas.

The idea is that scale will bring costs down and technology will create better models. “Needs must when the devil vomits into your kettle,” as Blackadder said.

Technology is critical. However, it needs to be the right technology. In the end, it is the market and business that will largely drive adoption.

Dr Jens Goennemann runs the federal government’s Advanced Manufacturing Growth Centre and says he has been preaching from the mountain on this for five years. Australia has again struck lucky with sun and a battery-in-the-ground resource. Manufacturing capability must take the country from lucky to smart.

“Heat pumps for the Brits are the solar panels for Australians,” Goennemann says.

“I have 35 on my roof. Australia’s uptake is over a third of the population, unlike Germany and the UK where the weather sucks.

“The next question is how we store that energy that I produce during the day when nobody needs it? Do I put it in a battery like lithium or a battery called hydrogen?”

Goennemann does agree that the technology needs to work, however. “Otherwise it is smoke and mirrors.”

He says “technology” has hijacked the work for manufacturing. It is true that much of the work underway to solve world crises is in manufacturing: from vaccines to greenhouse gas reduction.

“I have always seen manufacturing not as a vertical but as a capability to make things, preferably complex things,” he says.

On complexity Australia is behind. It ranks 86 on the Harvard Business School global Economic Complexity Index, sitting between Uzbekistan and Paraguay.

With $19.6m in tax payer funds the AMGC has leveraged itself with matched industry funds. It now has 100 live projects under management, from batteries to seaweed, expected to create an ­uplift in revenues of $1.5bn and 4000 new skilled jobs.

“It’s like vegemite that $19.6m, spread thinly on the bread but you can still taste us. We have changed the conversation,” Goennemann says. “Twiggy and Mike Cannon-Brookes, they are visionary in their statements. They are bold, critical of politicians. At the very end they need to do something for the rubber to hit the road.”

There is still the problem of scaling technology. How long will it take to have hydrogen power in vehicles or carbon capture and storage on an industrial scale? Goennemann says solving the tech first is the bigger hurdle, like a Covid vaccine.

“Yes we have a scaling problem, but focus on areas of relevance. It needs to be market driven,” he says.

“Global demand for critical minerals and green ­hydrogen brings Australia into a fortunate position. We need to disrupt ourselves out of ‘dig and ship’ fossils.”

Electric vehicles will come, ­although later in Australia than elsewhere, but Goennemann sees EVs as only one part of the puzzle.

“Very soon we will see a change in priority from the automotive primes to look into hydrogen fuel cells.”

As to targets – 2030, 2033, who cares? It will happen but it will be market-driven.

Goennemann points to Toyota’s market experience for hybrid cars in Australia. It took 17 years to sell the first 100,000 hybrids but, in July this year, Toyota clocked up another 100,000 over three years. There is now a six to nine-month wait for a RAV4 hybrid.

Through Covid Australians have come to expect that technology will solve problems. It is hard to see people buying EVs without being confident of functioning ­infrastructure that makes any switch seamless.

Customer service in digital technology has done a lot for the reputation of the NSW government through the pandemic: it has led on contact tracing and QR, vaccine passports and then on all-round public engagement.

In a speech on Tuesday, Customer Service Minister Victor Dominello is stepping up his agenda. He wants a real-time trust ­barometer on digital service for the public. For every government service, customers could give a thumbs up, thumbs down and ­provide feedback. Those services could then be weighted according to public priority.

Bad consumer outcomes from technology advances do get through, but it is rare. In 2007, the incandescent light bulb was banned in Australia and left a good chunk of the population incandescent. Even today, notwithstanding the very helpful Bunnings men and women, it often takes several of them to change a light bulb satisfactorily.

Incandescent bulbs were forced out because they lost too much energy in heat. Yet lighting researchers struggled to match their colour, simplicity and even ease using dimmers. The advice from Bill Gates remains current: “The advance of technology is based on making it fit in so that you don’t really even notice it, so it’s part of everyday life.”