On Thursday 8 October 2020, the ANU Energy Change Institute Public Forum hosted a webinar to explore the implications of the Australian Government’s Technology Investment Roadmap and First Low Emissions Technology Statement.

At the event, Climateworks Australia CEO Anna Skarbek joined an expert panel, chaired by Professor Ken Baldwin from the institute, and featuring

Australia’s Chief Scientist, Dr Alan Finkel AO; Dr Patrick Hartley from the CSIRO Hydrogen Industry Mission; Dr Liz Ratnam, a Future Engineering Research Leader Fellow at ANU; and Assoc. Prof. Llewelyn Hughes from the ANU Crawford School of Public Policy.

In her remarks, Anna stressed the importance of considering both ‘push’ and ‘pull’ factors.

‘A lot of the discussion in Technology Investment Roadmap and the Low Emissions Technology Statement,’ she said, ‘is on what is called the ‘push’ side – focussing on the supply of the technology and the costs of developing the technology and putting it making it available for use. But we know that deployment – or the ‘pull’ side of getting it into the market – is what can also help bring costs down. … It’s [with] push and pull coming together where we’ve seen greater success.’

She noted that Climateworks’ research had identified multiple pathways by which the targets set at the Paris Agreement might be met. Yet success still meant that the pace at which solutions were rolled out needed to accelerate.

‘It will need deployment not only of the technologies prioritised in the low emissions technology statement but also of the technologies noted in that paper as mature and as emerging.’

Anna Skarbek

For Anna, the scale of deployment remained key.

‘There’s a lot that can be built on,’ she said, ‘but it’s urgent that that building be done. [W]e’ve got this next year where there’ll be the long term strategy and another opportunity for another statement. And I would look to see a lot more commitment on demand-side – and hopefully a commitment on scale.’

The whole webinar can be viewed on Youtube.