Zooming along the green energy highway

Canberra Times
Wednesday 17/12/2008 Page: 1

If Australians are serious about cutting greenhouse emissions, they need to get used to the idea of driving "a little dinky car to work every day," says CSIRO energy research director, Dr John Wright.

Electric cars are smaller and lighter than the average car, and could be the answer to scaling back on transport emissions that currently account for 14% of Australia's greenhouse pollution. But can Australians kick the big car habit? "Electric cars have a bright future, and are going to have a real impact in the next 10 years. They make a lot of sense, even though they won't reduce traffic congestion. I can definitely see a future when electric cars are popular, mass-produced and a lot cheaper than fossil fuel powered cars," he says.

New battery technology invented by CSIRO which can reduce costs by improving the performance of hybrid-electric cars is "really zooming along, and in all our charts mapping future energy scenarios, we can see increased electrification of cars". Wright has been one of Australia's most influential, enthusiastic and tenacious champions of low-emission technologies, steering an astute political course during a period when climate change was not at the top of the Howard government's research agenda.

For the past six years, he has been a key player in consolidating Australia's reputation as a world leader in low-emission technology innovation. A former metallurgist, who helped developed a low emission process for smelting iron ore, Wright took on the role of chief of CSIRO's Energy Transformed national research flagship in 2002, building it "up from scratch" to a $55 million research effort. It now spans 13 CSIRO divisions and involves 18 universities as research partners.

Under his leadership, the flagship has pioneered world-first solar array technology and distributed energy systems. It developed the CSIRO UltraBattery, now being manufactured in the United States to power a new generation of hybrid vehicles. The flagship also designed a hybrid Holden, the Ecommodore, which used 50% less fuel than a full-sized family car and reduced exhaust fumes by 90%.

"We've done some interesting things, but there's so much more to do," he says. At the end of this month, Wright is leaving CSIRO to take a year's sabbatical, with no plans other than to renovate his house and travel overseas. But he definitely won't be retiring. "Too much is happening with new energy technologies, and I want to part of that," he says. In Australia, or overseas? Who knows? I never plan any thing.

Nothing I've done so far in my life has been planned, and I suspect that what I do next won't be planned either." He's an optimist - a self confessed "dreadful nerd who read physics and chemistry books for fun as a kid" - and he's confident the battle against climate change can be won.

All the costings show it's cheaper to mitigate than adapt to climate change, so why wouldn't we go down that path? "I think we'll see a mix of technologies capable of bringing greenhouse emissions down. It has to happen, we have no alternative, so we just have to get on with it. There are always problems with new technologies, but there are always novel ways to solve those problems."

Talking to Wright about the possibility of brave new technologies to curb the world's escalating energy emissions is a welcome antidote to the usual litany of greenhouse blues. Take his views on electric cars, for example. We already have a pretty good advantage in that the electricity distribution network is already there, so you can plug in your car at home. It's not that hard to set up a recharging station, but the talk is that soon you won't need to plug in the car.

It should be possible to build big induction loops in the ground, and they'll automatically charge your car when you park over the top of them. Range is a big problem, of course. I couldn't drive from Newcastle to Sydney and back again on one charge - it would be hard to drive even one way on one charge - and charging still takes quite a long time, but there are lots of ways to overcome those problems."

He has a similar optimism about future uptake of solar energy and the development of a "smart grid" that can effortlessly integrate a two-way flow of power. "Solar is fascinating and frustrating. The usual mantra is "why don't we throw out all the coal and go solar". It's so easy to say "go solar" but there are complications, particularly when you're using big solar fields to generate power.

Some of the solar fields in Spain have a big central tower and a vast array of mirrors, some of which are up to 2km away from that central target. All that distance reduce efficiency enormously." The CSIRO energy team at Newcastle has designed the most densely packed solar array in the world", with mirrors grouped around multiple towers. The big, single tower arrays require hundreds of costly, precision designed mirrors that must be focused to pin-point accuracy.

With multiple towers, you don't have the same problems with efficiency decreasing over distance, so we can make the mirrors quite cheaply from sheets of steel and mirrors stuck down with epoxy. You can turn out mirrors as cheap as chips, which keeps the costs down." His long-term vision is to have "big solar systems, with multiple towers producing power instantaneously," with some of those acting as heat storage systems.

They can be used to generate power at night or to shift peaks in power demand. That's the sort of thing that has to be done with solar to overcome some of the problems of intermittency, and if we can do that, we'll really be making big strides forward with solar.

"But - and there's always a but with these things - as soon as you start to introduce energy storage, you start to increase the size of the solar fields. That costs more money, so you're chasing your tail, but we can work something out." Two months ago, Wright was awarded one of CSIRO's highest honours - a lifetime achievement award for increasing the profile and impact of energy research in Australia. In his acceptance speech, he said he had wanted the flagship's Newcastle Headquarters "to make a splash in the energy scene," and to be an iconic energy facility that would showcase energy innovation in Australia.

"We've got wind turbines, we've got photovoltaics, we've got a very spectacular solar centre set up here, and it's going to achieve all the ambitions that we want in energy." It's been a long and interesting journey for a kid from Clovelly, who used to do all sorts of mad chemistry experiments" in a tin shed in the backyard.

"I used to do all sorts of horrible things, blowing things up, I almost gassed myself with chlorine at one stage." It's important to keep the excitement in science, he says. Ask him about solar towers and you can hear that excitement is still there. "These things are like solar furnaces, they can generate temperatures above 1000 degrees. It's great to see a solar tower in full cry. You've got to use these great big dark glasses to look at it, and there's the most fantastic white ghostly glow. It's amazing."