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| Tue, 15th Nov 2022 14:25:00 |
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Australia’s ‘carbon capital’ charts a course away from fossil fuels and a boom-bust cycle |
Queensland’s Gladstone council is pinning its hopes on a 10-year energy transition plan, amid concerns for its future in a net zero world
The 6.30am twin-engine service from Brisbane to Gladstone on Monday morning is chock full of blokes in hi-vis and heavy boots.
But this week federal public servants, journalists, renewable energy advocates and the Queensland energy minister joined the usual crowd of Fifo workers descending on the town.
They travelled for the Gladstone council’s unveiling of a 10-year energy transition plan, designed to reposition the region as “a renewable energy superpower”.
The glossy brochures accompanying the plan are big on lofty ambition but light on measurable outcomes. The talk is of a rapidly expanding workforce building “massive amounts” of large scale renewable energy projects and of leading global green hydrogen production.
This kind of document would not often make national news. But this is Gladstone, the world’s fifth largest coal exporting port, a harbour town built on heavy industries like alumina, ammonia and liquefied natural gas exports.
It is Australia’s “carbon capital”.
That economic transition is being spoken about at all – let alone loudly spruiked by the mayor and unanimously backed by his council – is significant.
“A few years ago talking about renewables was a taboo subject,” Gladstone Conservation Council’s Anna Hitchcock says. “Now it’s all totally out in the open.”
For one of the plan’s leading architects, The Next Economy’s chief executive, Dr Amanda Cahill, that’s the point.
The roadmap is not one of graphs and modelling she says. Though research-based, it is more of a “wayfinder”. Governments can aim for net zero targets in 2050, but the pace of technological change is happening so fast that “if you can see beyond five years you’re doing well”.
The plan stakes out council’s role in the transition in areas like building facilities to make sure workers choose to raise families locally, not fly back to their homes. Cahill says the plan is also about sending a message.
“[This is] a signal to the world that there has been a shift about where people’s heads are at and what they are willing to do,” she says.
So could this region, synonymous in the imagination of many with infamous clashes between coalminers and the environmentalists, really be gearing up to drive the country towards a green energy future?
That might be the question, but talk in the town on Monday is dominated by another portentous arrival that morning.
Read original full article
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