Grounded 3 - Future Energy Technologies
Director of Energy at Tesla Mark Twidell, Chief scientist at Woodside Energy Neil Kavanagh and Monash Professor and Director of the Woodside - Monash Energy Partnership Paul Webley were asked to look into their crystal balls and predict what the future of energy technology looked like
However, before jumping into the future Mr Twidell kicked things off with a presentation about what’s happening at Tesla now.
“Tesla’s mission is to accelerate the world's transition to sustainable energy,” Mr Twidell said.
Mr Twidell is primarily focused on battery storage and is working on making a battery that will reduce carbon emissions.
“Tesla has chosen two sectors to focus on, transportation and the energy sector,” Mr Twidell said.
Currently the company is making a lot of progress in developed nations, especially in regards to creating charging networks for vehicles, but the company is also making moves in developing nations as well.
“Another big opportunity we are starting to see is island nations moving from previously being 100% reliant on diesel to very quickly transitioning to...95% renewables,” he said.
Software was another key development Mr Twidell talked about in regards to Tesla’s master plan for renewable energy vehicles and electricity grids.
“The pace of innovation in the software platform and how that leads to economic opportunities and fiscal opportunities is all really really exciting.”
In regards to the future of energy technology Mr Kavanagh was optimistic hydrogen could play a complementary role to other energy sources including renewables. A view which differed from the views of the Grounded panelists from webinar 1.
“What is distinctive about hydrogen is the scale of the energy storage that is possible...which is kinda unlimited, which is not the case for most of the other battery technologies today,” he said.
“But it is also the case that hydrogen is quite costly to store, so I think you will find some economic limit on the volume of storage you can have.”
Mr Webley also agreed hydrogen was complementary to other energy sources, and said we should expect to see different types of batteries on seasonal variations.
However, Mr Webley also said if Australia wants to decarbonise our atmosphere we need to take our wind and solar energy use and multiple it by a factor of 70 and we have to do it quickly.
“We are not looking to electrify, we are looking to decarbonise...it is completely impractical to electrify everything,” he said.
“Electrifying is one way to decarbonise and we should use it when it is sensible…. There absolutely are areas we should be electrifying but there is a much easier way and much cheaper ways to decarbonise our fossil fuels.”
Converting our natural gas to hydrogen and putting it in our pipelines was one of Mr Webley’s suggestions.
The webinar concluded with Mr Kavannagh outlining some problems he would like to see the Woodside project solve.
Mr Kavanagh said he would like to create as many carbon neutral products as possible to help better society.