Antony Funnell: Hello, Antony Funnell here. Welcome to the program. Sara Phillips is one of my colleagues here at the ABC. She's the editor of our online environment portal. And she was recently in Canada for a summit that looked ahead to the year 2030 to strategise about what forms of renewable energy held the most promise for the future. Here's her report:

[Carbon video excerpt]: It's everywhere. You see it on the news, in your newspaper, on the net. Energy prices are going through the stratosphere. We are dependent on non-renewal fossil fuels, what some call high-carbon energy. And at the rate and way we're using energy, that might lead to irreversible damage. A global crisis is coming. What will we do? Will factories go silent, homes dark, economies grind to a halt? The world in chaos...

Sara Phillips: It sounds pretty catastrophic, doesn't it? This scenario was what confronted participants at the first Equinox Summit. Twenty-two energy experts from around the world sat down with a forum of 17 people under 30 years of age. The 17 were selected from hundreds of applicants worldwide. Young professionals who deal with policy, investment and business. They were there to devise a plan for the future of the world's energy. Among them was Marc McArthur.

Marc McArthur: I think a lot of the technologies that we imagine for the future are here, right now, and they'll just be used in different ways. So there wasn't any single technology that I saw that I would say is the source of energy for the future. If one thing has been established so far from the time that we've been here, is that it will be and will need to be a blend of different solutions that are appropriate for both the geography and the time.

Sara Phillips: We'll come back to the forum's young observers a little later. But first let's pick up on some of the technologies highlighted at the summit. The event was in some ways a showcase for promising energy sources, and one of the scientists there to make his pitch was Craig Dunne, a geologist at Borealis Geo-Power, a Canadian company that's involved in geothermal.

Craig Dunne: Geothermal has the opportunity to actually very much run in the background, which I think is how most people like their energy. We want a small environmental footprint, we want our lights to go on when we turn them on. I think most people don't spend a lot of time of their day thinking about how their lights work or where the power for their car comes from. I think one of the major advantages is that geothermal cost-effectively can sort of keep that alive, in terms of you have all the power you need and you can start to feel good about the fact that it's coming from a resource that you understand to be safe and green and base-load, and the legacy you can hand on to your children without having to worry about cancer-causing agents and missing mountain-tops and a number of the things that we currently face with our carbon environment.

Sara Phillips: Geothermal energy isn't one of the more prominent renewable energy technologies, at least in Australia. But it has a long history, and is already being used to supplement or replace carbon-related power generation in numerous countries. It involves injection water deep underground to where there are naturally occurring hot rocks, and using that heat to run steam turbines to produce electricity.

Craig Dunne: Steam fields, opportunities to produce power from steam itself, have already been in development for over 100 years already. Places like Italy, California, Iceland, there's over 10,000 megawatts already produced in the world, and serving apparently over 60 million people. So in terms of the initial opportunity, we've actually been developing geothermal for decades already. I think there's a number of opportunities for future advancement of this technology, with the advancement of binary turbine technology and innovative drilling strategies and equipment.

Sara Phillips: By 2030 where will we be? Will this technology be widespread?

Craig Dunne: I think there's a few obstacles for the geothermal industry in terms of how we finance projects, exploration strategies that can afford to show some improvement. But I think that geothermal is continuing to show itself as a viable option for the future, and I think as base-load renewable power becomes more and more of a demand, we're going to see the price for that make it easier to go towards project economics.

Sara Phillips: But as Craig Dunne acknowledged, while it holds promise geothermal still has some significant obstacles. And a large part of the difficulty revolves around visibility.

Craig Dunne: The geothermal industry is not a wealthy industry. It would be a huge advantage for us to be able to take the level of capital that the oil and gas industry has for exploration and development. If we can move forward with some of the R&D in terms of exploration strategies that we can really move this industry forward quickly, and I also think that we have a marketing problem in geothermal. There are countries like Australia, like Iceland, that it's a little more prevalent. But in the Canadian market right now it's not talked about and it's a difficult conversation to broach. Many people think geo-exchange or heat-pump technology when we tell them that there's the opportunity to produce power. Many people haven't heard of this before, and it requires a conversation, rather than 'Oh, I understand how wind works, I understand how solar works. Explain this geothermal thing to me again?'

Sara Phillips: This is Future Tense. I'm Sara Phillips, the editor of ABC Environment Online. And today we're looking at several clean energy alternatives highlighted at the recent Equinox Summit in Waterloo, Canada. The summit brought together leading scientists and a handful of brilliant young people to explore how cutting edge science and technology can help move us towards a low-carbon energy future.

[Fukushima TV report]: Wednesday morning dawned with yet another fire in the explosion-plagued Number 4 reactor at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. The fire was out in short order, but then white smoke was seen rising from Reactor Number 3...

Sara Phillips: Even before this year's Fukushima disaster, nuclear energy was struggling with its reputation, despite being the major non-carbon energy source for large parts of the world. In fact events in Japan saw the German government announce the closure of its 17 nuclear plants by 2022. But participants at the Equinox Summit were told that there is a form of nuclear power that still holds promise for the future. Yacine Kadi is a physicist at CERN, the European Centre for Nuclear Research. He's been involved in developing a new type of reactor that uses the radioactive element thorium as its fuel instead of uranium.

Yacine Kadi: It offers many answers to the actual problems which are plaguing the nuclear industry today. Those problems are related to production of nuclear waste, proliferation issues. Availability of resources, notably uranium, and also safety. I put it last but it's not the least important, of course, and we've seen what happened a few months ago.

So the system we've been advocating, and we've been doing quite a lot of research on this over the last 20 years, if combined with thorium would really give this sustainability mark to nuclear energy as it exists today. We know that even if we decide to phase out nuclear energy for those countries which have been using this form of energy for the last 40 years, the issue of nuclear waste still remains, so we have to find a solution as well.

So the idea is that by using thorium we may be able to solve all these issues. So that's why it's quite attractive. Thorium is much more abundant than uranium, actually four to five times more abundant. It's widely distributed on the planet so it could be readily available to many of the countries that are interested in using this kind of fuel. And also it's much more efficient to use. Through the breeding process uranium 233, so the daughter product, which is very fissile, and it makes use of the initial resources in a much more efficient way. So thorium has many, many...and one of, of course, the biggest advantages is that thorium does not produce plutonium, so that clearly opens the way to what I call the democratisation of nuclear power. So with this in mind, the fact that thorium sources are available widely, that we don't produce plutonium so no proliferation risks, and that we don't generate waste with these systems, so that opens the way to global deployment of these systems.

Sara Phillips: Thorium powered nuclear reactors are already being labelled by some as the green nuclear alternative. But the promise they offer is still just that, a promise. The research is ongoing.

Yacine Kadi: For the moment we've been doing laboratory-scale type of work. I think we have proven its main fundamentals, so the system works. A lot of studies and also experiments have been carried out in many countries. Certain countries like China and others are also engaging in R&D as far as thorium is concerned. We hope that in 10 to 20 years time we should have at least a demonstration unit, so that could show how the system is really behaving, and whether it is fulfilling its promises.

Sara Phillips: Will it make people's lives better? In what way will it?

Yacine Kadi: It will make people's life better at least for those countries who are really considering investing heavily in nuclear energy. Today I think India and China, for example, which are the main countries, are free of nuclear waste. By themselves these two countries will probably double or triple the number of nuclear power reactors installed in the world. So we have currently about 450 reactors installed. China and India are considering installing maybe another between 500 and 1,000 additional reactors. If we use the current technology which exists today, you can imagine how much nuclear waste we are going to generate on top of what already exists. What are the risks which would be associated with the quantity of plutonium that would be produced? We are entering somehow into a plutonium economy. And what also are the safety risks? We may see other accidents. So I think it's a good choice to give those countries the possibility to invest in another form of nuclear energy, what I call a cleaner form, at least, which would avoid having these kind of problems.

[Carbon video excerpt]: When the first urban power plant was installed by Thomas Edison in New York City in 1882, it served only a small neighbourhood and burned a modest amount of fuel. One plant, 58 houses. But as power stations and a delivery grid became a universal concept, the globe's energy requirements became colossal.

Greg Naterer: Hydrogen is important because it is a potentially major solution to the problems of climate change and depleting conventional fuels. Hydrogen when it's oxidised or burned, it doesn't release greenhouse gas emissions, it's just water vapour that's released. So the water vapour would rise, be part of the clouds, rain back down, and you'd have this perfect cycle of splitting of water, which is producing hydrogen and oxygen, and then the hydrogen recombines. When it's burned it produces water vapour, it recombines. So you have this endless cycle. And really a sustainable fuel of the future.

Sara Phillips: That's Dr Greg Naterer, associate dean of the faculty of engineering and applied science at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology. Like nuclear, hydrogen is a potential energy source that's also suffered a bad reputation. In hydrogen's case it's been the number of false dawns scientists have had. But according to Dr Naterer research is continuing, despite the enormous difficulties of extracting hydrogen from water, because the technology promises pollution-free energy if they can make it work.

Greg Naterer: Water is a very stable molecule. It doesn't want to be broken apart. So you can split water in a number of ways. You can use electricity: it's called electrolysis, there's an existing commercial technology that can do that. However it's relatively inefficient and relatively high-cost. So right now most of the hydrogen in the world, about 96% or 97%, is produced using fossil fuels, because the electrolysis route is just not as cost-competitive. The alternative that we're working on is a different process of splitting water using heat. And heat alone is...if you want to try to heat water to the point of splitting the water molecule, that's very difficult. It takes temperatures on the order of 3,000 degrees, which is not practical and viable to do that on a large scale. So the process that we're working on is called the thermo-chemical cycle, a copper chlorine water splitting cycle, where you introduce intermediate copper and chlorine compounds in a cycle of processes that brings that water splitting temperature down to 500 degrees and makes it viable to then link it with solar energy or nuclear energy, or other forms of energy.

Sara Phillips: So what are the stumbling blocks, what's stopping us from getting there?

Greg Naterer: One of the main ones right now is we have market forces, that hydrogen has to be cost-competitive. So the price of one kilogram of hydrogen, or just the energy content, rather, of one kilogram of hydrogen is about the same as a gallon of gasoline. So right now the cost of producing and distributing hydrogen is more than a gallon of gasoline. So if we take $4 per gallon of gasoline, which is not an unrealistic price to assume, you're looking at hydrogen between $5 and $10. So once we get the price under a gallon of gasoline equivalent, I think then things could change quickly in favour of hydrogen.

Sara Phillips: And what's being done at the moment to overcome some of those challenges?

Greg Naterer: There's research around the world on methods of sustainable and cleaner hydrogen production. Throughout the European Union, North America, US, and countries really around the world, Japan, China, on these thermochemical cycles of hydrogen production. There is also work on biological hydrogen production using biomass gasification. Other methods out there, really exciting, innovative research. And I'm really optimistic that we'll be able to significantly reduce the price of hydrogen and make it environmentally benign.

Sara Phillips: So hydrogen, thorium nuclear, and geothermal were some of the energy alternatives explored at the summit. But there was a focus not just on energy sources, but also energy efficiency. The CSIRO's Dr Cathy Foley was there to speak about new developments in superconductors.

Cathy Foley: A superconductor is a material that when it's cooled to a particular temperature called a critical temperature that allows electricity to pass through it without any resistance to its flow. So you get something which allows you to have, say, a long piece of wire, pass a current through it and there are no losses.

Sara Phillips: So when we have our electricity coming from the Latrobe Valley up to Melbourne, or from Newcastle down to Sydney, and we've got electricity wires, how much energy is lost along the way.

Cathy Foley: Well in the wires themselves it's only, it depends on how well it's set up, but it's about 5% to 9%. But we still lose a lot of electricity or energy as we go through the various different transformers to go from a low voltage to a high voltage for transmission lines and then again, when we go from high voltage down to the low voltage to use in our houses, and just the generators themselves, means that the electricity that's made in the power station, or the energy that goes in to make that electricity, we only get about 20% or 30% in house or industry use at the other end.

Sara Phillips: And how can superconductors help us?

Cathy Foley: Well, because they've got virtually no losses it means that at various stages along the way, if you have a superconducting infrastructure you're just able to not have any of that loss or that heating up that is causing the opportunity which is getting all the energy you make into where you want to use it.

Sara Phillips: So what are the challenges we need to overcome to get to this?

Cathy Foley: Well, for example, in high TC materials, which are superconducting materials that become superconducting when you cool them with liquid nitrogen. It's a difficult material, because even though it's an excellent superconductor it's actually a ceramic, and so making wires out of a brick is not easy, and that's a challenge and that's been something which for the last 25 years since their discovery has been an ongoing process of improvement. So that's one thing. The other thing is the coolant itself. Having something which requires you to cool things down to minus 200 degrees or more means that you have to be able to have ways of either compact coolers or being able to take the liquid nitrogen and re-cool it so that you've got a closed system. That's well developed but it's a bit tricky. The other one is actually acceptance, and the willingness to invest in new infrastructure, and doing it in a planned and timely way, so that as the older infrastructure, particularly in the power industry, which might last for 50 or more years...as it gets old and time to turn over, there's the foresight to see it being replaced with something that's superconducting.

Sara Phillips: Cathy Foley from the CSIRO.

The organisers of the Equinox Summit plan to produce a blueprint detailing what they believe needs to be done to accelerate the development of non-carbon energy alternatives. It's due out in late November. The summit also produced an interim communique, which you can see on the Future Tense website. And what of those 17 young professionals who were there as both participants and observers? Well here are some of their thoughts on the future.

[Montage of young summit participants]:

Lia Demange : Before the summit I was very critical about nuclear because of the ways the...about the politics involved and the policy and lack of transparency in a lot of countries related to their waste disposal and to the functioning and the safety levels. But after the summit I realised that we need to search extra additional amount of energy in the future, that we are probably not going to have much options besides the nuclear if we are going to address the climate change problem.

Marc McArthur: There wasn't any single technology that I saw that I would say is the source of energy for the future. If one thing has been established so far from the time that we've been here is that it will be, and will need to be, a blend of different solutions that are appropriate for both the geography and the time.

Will Catton: If I could second what Marc just said, what we're getting from this forum is a picture of a really large variety of possibilities, which we can see happening. But we'll have to see what happens with time, because there just isn't information at the moment as to the feasibility of some of these higher technologies. There's huge inefficiencies in the way that we do things. Society's effectively driving around with the hand-brake on. So I think that it's pretty clear that it's possible for us to fix this problem. The question is more one of motivation and messaging and just whether we get our act into gear.

Antony Funnell: The voices of some of those who attended the Equinox Summit in Waterloo, Canada. And the reporter there was Sara Phillips.

Now the IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change recently issued a document on renewable energy which suggests that renewables could one day replace fossil fuel entirely. But according to our next guest, Dr Ted Trainer, from the University of New South Wales, transitioning to renewables is meaningless unless society also reassesses the underlying consumption that drives energy need...

Ted Trainer: The problems that consumer societies run into are just insurmountable. They're enormous. They're created by the society we have with its structures and dynamics. And you're not going to solve the big problems of resource depletion, environmental destruction, third world deprivation, conflicts over resources and in fact declining quality of life in rich countries. They're all caused by over-consumption and you're not going to solve them until you change to different structures and different processes. And I'm afraid that most people just don't grasp that this is not about reforming a consumer society to not generate the problems. We're not going to get out of this predicament till we change to very, very different ways.

Antony Funnell: So underpinning your argument is a fundamental concern about growth as the central driver of our lives.

Ted Trainer: If you just look at the situation we're in, the resource consumption we have in rich countries now, if everybody in the world consumed like us we'd have to produce five or seven times as much every year of everything. And the resources are all getting scarcer now. Secondly, just look at the footprint concept. They're telling us that Australians need about eight hectares of productive land to provide for one person. Now if 10 billion people were going to live like that, we'd need 80 billion hectares of productive land. Do you realise that's ten times as much productive land as there is on the planet? There are a number of arguments like that that just show that we are grossly unsustainable. We're far beyond levels that could ever be achieved for all. And technical advance simply can't make anything like that possible.

You just have to go down to much, much lower levels of production consumption resource use. Now all that's just a comment on the present situation. When we add in the fact of a commitment to growth, everything gets ridiculous. If we have 3% growth in the economy. If by 2050 ten billion people had risen to the levels of consumption we Australians would have with 3% growth, the total world economic output would be 20 to 30 times what it is now every year. So the whole thing gets farcical if you add in the growth commitment.

Antony Funnell: Does the discussion that we have over and over again, the sort of polarised debate between left and right about renewable energy -- does that then really suck up time, does that really just get in the way of this broader discussion?

Ted Trainer: Well, not really if it was a thorough debate, because it is absolutely crucial to sort out whether renewables could save us, and of course that's the overwhelmingly dominant mainstream assumption. It's a faith, that we really don't have to face up to changing our ways or our social structures. We can all go on pursuing affluent lifestyles and getting richer all the time, because we just substitute renewables for fossil fuels all will be well. We've solved the environmental problem. Now we obviously need a very careful, thorough examination of whether that is indeed possible, and the IPCC has let us down. This recent report is immensely disappointing. It simply doesn't deal satisfactorily with the question, it doesn't answer the question. And it's worse than that, because theses glowing reports make most people believe that of course everything's fine. We just wait for the technicians to bring in the sun and the wind and we won't have greenhouse problems.

Antony Funnell: So there's a complacency because we all believe in our heart of hearts that one day there will be a technology fix to our problems.

Ted Trainer: That's right. Right through the whole debate for the last 50 years or so the tech fix solution has been the default position, hasn't it? The mainstream and of course the experts and the economists, when you start raising limits issues, they immediately go to, 'Oh, technology will solve the problems.' Well there are many arguments there that they really need to deal with and it seems to me pretty clear that the things I started to say earlier indicate a problem whose magnitude is just insurmountable. It's enormous. And if technology's going to solve our problems, what I'd like to know is when is it going to start? They're all rapidly getting alarmingly worse.

Antony Funnell: That was Dr Ted Trainer. Now, as Sara Phillips mentioned earlier, Germany recently surprised the world by deciding that its future would be entirely non-nuclear. It was a decision welcomed by many environmentalists, but according to freelance energy writer and author David Strahan, the decision means coal, not renewables, will once again be king.

David Strahan: Germany got, what, 23% of its electricity from nuclear last year, and 17% of its electricity came from renewables, and now it's saying it's going to scrap all its nuclear by 2022. So what that means is it's created a very large hole which it has to fill. And under existing plans it was planning to create another 18% t's worth of electricity from renewables by 2020. But obviously that's 5% short of the hole that it's created by getting rid of the nuclear. So I think the likelihood is that at the end of this decade they are going to have less low-carbon electricity generation than they do at the moment. And that is the direct impact of pulling out of nuclear.

Antony Funnell: And that means more coal. They're strangely talking about coal, aren't they, as a new bridging technology.

David Strahan: Yes, I know, it's an Orwellian term, really. Only last year they had talked about nuclear as the bridging technology to a wholly renewable future, and now they're saying it's coal and gas. They're building another 20 gigawatts of coal and gas fired plant which they need basically to fill the hole left by nuclear and to balance the additional renewables. Obviously renewables are intermittent, so you need to find some way to fill the gaps when the wind isn't blowing and the sun's not shining strongly enough. And all the signs are that they're going to do that with coal and gas. So what this means is that their emissions are probably going to rise. In fact they almost certainly will rise. According to Barclays capital I think they think that it will mean probably another 300 million tonnes of CO₂ will come out of Germany's electricity generators by 2020, which is I think equal to the combined annual emissions of I think Spain and Italy, which is an enormous number. And that's going to have knock-on effects on the EU ETS, the emissions trading scheme in Europe. It'll mean that the emissions certificates will rise in price, which means that everybody else in Europe will be paying higher energy bills as a direct consequence of Germany's withdrawal from nuclear. So what they're doing is making it harder for themselves, for Germany to hit its 2020 emissions targets, but they're also making it more expensive for everybody else to do the same.

Antony Funnell: And the decision to go away from nuclear, to abandon nuclear, which came after the problems in Japan, that was a bit of a surprise, wasn't it, because only last year they had committed to a nuclear future.

David Strahan: Well they had at least committed to extend the life of their nuclear power stations out till the mid-2030s. This was if you like a U-turn on a U-turn. Last year Chancellor Merkel said yes, and had won approval, to extend the lives of their existing nuclear plants up to 2036, and now in the wake of Fukushima they have decided to scrap that and go back to their original position if you like. And I think it's very political decision, of course, as most nuclear decisions are. And it's against the backdrop of strong opposition to nuclear power in Germany. There is really quite a lot of resistance. So one can understand that there is a political problem there, I just think that they've come up with the wrong answer.

Antony Funnell: It is a bit of a surprise that Germany's renewables only account for 17% of its low-carbon generation, because is often held up, isn't it, as a leader in terms of renewable technology.

David Strahan: Well it is, and it has been the country where we've seen, certainly in the western world in recent years the strongest growth in wind and solar. And they have had some pretty astonishing growth rates. The problem is for Germany as well as anybody else is that growing renewables from a low base doesn't really matter how fast you grow if you're starting from a very low base, as Germany was a couple of decades ago, it takes time to get up to a meaningful proportion of the total. Having said that, countries like Britain are a long, long way behind Germany. So I don't think we should take away from Germany's record, it's just that of their 40% low-carbon generation more than half of it was until recently nuclear.

Antony Funnell: David Strahan, author of the The Last Oil Shock, thank you very much for bringing us up to date.

David Strahan: Thanks for having me.

Antony Funnell: And that's the program. Thanks to co-producer Andrew Davies and sound engineer Peter McMurray.