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The idea is to use remote and proximal sensing - think satellites, drones or truck-mounted sensors - to estimate how much carbon is in a farmer's soil. The government hopes that by making it cheaper to measure the amount of carbon in the soil, it will become profitable for farmers to change how they manage their land, and get carbon credits for sequestering carbon. It's lost from the soil when the ground cover dies and isn't replaced, when the soil is turned over or when it washes away. Investing in soil carbonĪnother priority investment in the roadmap is "soil carbon".Ĭarbon gets sequestered in soil when plants grow in it. Now it needs an NTN - National Transmission Network - to de-congest electricity," he says. "Australia is building new highways, an inland rail the NBN to de-congest transport and IT. "Lots of new transmission is the key priority." "The chief impediment is lack of transmission to bring the new cheap solar power from where it is generated in the countryside into the cities," he says. The government wants to get solar energy down to $15 per megawatt hour - about half what it costs now. "Solar at $15 per MWh allows us to think about sucking CO2 back out of the atmosphere."īut Professor Blakers says the cost of solar is not the main roadblock to its accelerated rollout. "Solar at $25 per MWh is far cheaper than coal and gas for electricity generation, and also kills gas heating in buildings and in industry," he says. "Ultra-low-cost solar is a worthy goal," Professor Blakers says.īut he says we'll probably get there in the 2030s anyway. The government has tallied up the work being done by agencies, saying it wants to get solar energy down to $15 per megawatt hour, which is about half what it costs now. The newest addition to the list of technologies in the roadmap is "ultra-low cost solar". Secondly, it's directing the agencies to focus their existing budgets on particular measures. Firstly, it's tallying up the work those agencies were already doing. Through the roadmap, the government is doing two things. The government says it's a $20-billion investment - but it's an investment by agencies like the Clean Energy Finance Corporation. The Technology Investment Roadmap does the most work in the government's plan, assumed to cut emissions in half between now and 2050. ( ABC News: Hugh Sando) Technology Investment Roadmap Professor Blakers says if we do the easier emissions reductions in the 2020s and simultaneously invest in the research, then we should be able to tackle those harder sectors in the 2030s.īut if we do approach things the other way around, as the government proposes, what could it look like?Īround 10 per cent of emissions come from coal and gas extraction. Those are harder and require research and development. The final 20 per cent is from aviation, shipping, metals, chemicals and the land sector. Nothing to invent," says Professor Blakers. "This trends to zero as coal and gas mining trends to zero. The next 10 per cent of emissions comes from coal and gas extraction. "Then stand back and watch the solar and wind farm companies get busy," he says. Professor Blakers says the thing needed to accelerate that is investment in transmission lines, then incentives to push electric vehicles into the market. The net cost will be about zero because solar and wind is so cheap," he says. "These are easily eliminated by solar and wind pushing coal and gas out of generation electric vehicles replacing fuel vehicles and electric heat pumps and heaters replacing gas heating. Experts and big companies are testing the waters to see if green hydrogen will be our energy of the future.