Wednesday, April 22 - Melbourne

My first meeting this morning was with Claire Maries, Policy Manager for Pacific Hydro as well as Emily Wood, Communications Director for Pacific Hydro. Pacific Hydro is the largest renewable energy company in Australia. They are developing large scale wind projects near Portland which I hope to visit on Monday. We discussed in depth the challenges in developing and integrating large scale renewable projects in Australia. They believe that the Emission Trading Scheme as well as the Renewable Targets will work very well together to help reduce the effects of climate change. They felt very strongly about the need for the current Rudd Government to implement both a strong ETS as well as Renewable Targets, they believe they should encourage and incentivize voluntary action on the part of ratepayers and not doing these things could hurt Rudd in the next election.
They have look to examples in the US, specifically Texas, which have some progressive policies regarding the building of transmission infrastructure needed for the integration of renewable projects like wind. Claire does not believe that Australia has done what it needed to do to create the ability of new industries to develop in the production of renewable energy projects. For example, she thinks that any opportunity that Australia had to manufacture materials for wind turbines has long since passed and they are slowly letting opportunities to build solar thermal technologies and ocean technologies are slipping away.
I plan on flying to Portland on Monday to visit the wind farms in person.
I then met up with Giles Toler, Melbourne Sales Manager for Emerson. Mike Traine, a 2008 Eisenhower Fellow, arranged for Giles to help with some meetings. Giles is a British ex pat, and is incredibly accommodating and kind. We met up with Mark Colette from TruEnergy and had lunch. Mark works for TruEnergy. TruEnergy delivers traditional coal fire electricity, but they also have demonstration projects in the wind, solar, geothermal and tidal areas. As of right not, they do not see large scale generation coming from any one of these projects but they are continuing to invest in potential technologies. We discussed the Emissions Trading Scheme as well as the Renewable Targets. Mark was fascinated with American politics, so we got to discuss my favorite subject as well.
After lunch, Giles and I drove to the Progress Group. The Progress Group is an engineering/fabrication company that builds skids that clean various fuels. For example, they make machines that help purify gas when it comes out of the ground or that separates oil and water that is extracted from gas wells. They are involved with two very exciting projects. The first is participating in the CO2 Research Collaborative that is injecting carbon into empty gas wells and studying what happens to the carbon. The project is scheduled to last two years and they hope to get very good data about what exactly happens to the carbon that is injected into the ground (does it escape, does it turn into something else, does it stay captured). The second project is one at the Hazelwood power plant which is one of the dirtiest plants in Australia. It uses “brown” coal with is very high in carbon emissions (although it is low in SOX and NOX emissions.) This project is a small scale demonstration project that actually captures carbon from the exhaust stream from the smoke stack. Although carbon capture has been used in the past, this is one of the first projects that works to capture the exhaust directly . Progress Group hopes that this technology coupled with the data that is gathered from the CO2 Research Collaborative will help develop a workable CCS solution.
Interestingly enough, most of the dirty power plants are located in the Latrobe Valley near Melbourne. The good news is that not to far offshore there is some very large storage capacity in depleted gas wells that could be the perfect storage facilities for the carbon.
Dinner was with Jerry Ellis, Australian Fellow in 1983, and a his wife Ann. They were absolutely delightful and took me to one of the iconic Melbourne restaurants. We discussed energy, politics, as well as family. Interestingly enough, Jerry is one of the few Australians that I have met that does not believe that climate change is man-made. As a general rule, I have found that Australians, especially Victorians, having faced almost a decade of droughts, high temperatures, devastating brush fires as well as flooding in the North are pretty convinced that climate change is real and that they are directly affected by it.
Tomorrow I fly to Canberra and stay there for two days, meeting with Federal Government officials as well as U.S. Embassy personnel