China’s Premier Li Qiang inspects a hydrogen refuelling truck as Executive Chairman of Fortescue Andrew Forrest (C) looks on at the Fortescue Hazelmere research and development facility in Hazelmere, a suburb of Perth on June 18, 2024.
| Photo Credit: AFP

Chinese Premier Li Qiang has ended his Australian tour on June 18 in the west coast city of Perth where he has focused on China’s investment in critical minerals, clean energy and business links.

Perth is the capital of Western Australia State, which provided 39% of the world’s iron ore last year. Iron ore is one of Australia’s most lucrative exports. Analysts say the commodity was spared the type of trade bans that Beijing imposed on other Australian exports as bilateral relations soured three years ago because the steel-making ingredient was crucial to Chinese industrial growth.

Last week, Mr. Li became the first Chinese premier to visit New Zealand then Australia in seven years. He left Perth late on June 18 for Malaysia, where he’ll be China’s first premier to visit since 2015.

While in Perth, China’s second-most powerful leader after President Xi Jinping inspected iron ore miner Fortescue’s clean energy research facility.

Fortescue’s chairman Andrew Forrest said Mr.Li was interested in the company’s plans to produce iron ore without carbon emissions and potentially “green iron.” “I think China chose us because it’s not just the best technology to go green in Australia, it’s the best technology to go green in the world and we’ve got real examples of it in trains, ship engines, trucks,” Forrest told The Associated Press before the visit.

The Perth facility is testing technology on hydrogen, ammonia and batter power for trains, ships, trucks and heavy mining equipment.

Focuses on Critical Minerals

Mr. Li also visited Chinese-controlled Tianqi Lithium Energy Australia’s processing plant south of Perth to underscore China’s interest in investing in critical minerals. The plant produces battery-grade lithium hydroxide for electric vehicles.

Australia shares U.S. concerns over China’s global dominance in critical minerals and control over supply chains in the renewable energy sector.

Citing Australia’s national interests, Treasurer Jim Chalmers recently ordered five Chinese-linked companies to divest their shares in the rare earth mining company Northern Minerals.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese wrote in an opinion piece published in Perth’s main newspaper, The West Australian, on June 18, that his government was acting to ensure foreign investment “continues to serve our national interests.”

“This includes reforming the foreign investment framework so that it’s more efficient, more transparent and more effective at managing risk,” Mr. Albanese wrote.

Mr. Forrest said the national risk from Chinese investment in the critical minerals sector was overstated.

“Australia should be producing all the critical minerals in the world because we’re a great mining country, so by all means let’s go in harder after critical minerals, but let’s not do it with panic because there is no reason for panic,” Mr. Forrest said.

Mr. Qiang and Mr. Albanese flew to Perth in separate planes late on June 17 from the national capital Canberra where the two leaders held an official annual meeting with senior ministers in Parliament House.

Both leaders attended a round table of business leaders in Perth representing resource companies including mining giants BHP and Rio Tinto.

Business Council of Australia chief executive Bran Black said business dialogue was essential to the bilateral relations between the two free trading partners.

“While there have been challenging times in the bilateral relationship between the two nations, I think it’s fair to say this is another positive point of progress,” Black told the meeting.

“It shows that whilst the parameters of a bilateral relationship are set by governments, they will always be sustained by the quality of the personal relationships and especially those personal relationships that subsist on a business-to-business level,” Black added.

Chinese premiers and Australian prime ministers met annually from 2013 until 2019, after which Beijing banned minister-to-minister contacts over the previous conservative government’s call for an independent investigation into the causes of and responses to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Relations had already been strained by Australian legislation that banned covert foreign interference in Australian politics and the exclusion of Chinese-owned telecommunications giant Huawei from rolling out the national 5G network due to securit

Beijing initiated a reset in relations after Mr.Anthony Albanese’s center-left Labor Party was elected in 2022.

The annual meetings resumed when Mr. Albanese visited Beijing in November last year.

Concerns over press freedom

Mr. Albanese revealed that his office had complained to the Chinese Embassy about the behavior of two officials during a media event with the two leaders after June 17th meeting.

Australia had “concerns” about two Chinese officials who stood in the way of cameras taking images of well-known Australian journalist Cheng Lei sitting with other reporters as the leaders spoke, Mr. Albanese said.

Mrs. Cheng spent more than three years in detention in China for breaking an embargo with a broadcast on a state-run TV network while she was based in Beijing. She was released last year after interventions by the Australian government and now works for Sky News Australia.

“When you look at the footage, it was a pretty clumsy attempt, frankly, by a couple of people to stand in between where the cameras were and where Mrs. Cheng Lei was sitting,” Mr. Albanese said.

“There should be no impediments to Australian journalists going about their job and we’ve made that clear to the Chinese Embassy,” Mr. Albanese added.

Chinese-born Cheng told Sky News on June 17 that the officials “went to great lengths to block me from the cameras and to flank me.” “I’m only guessing that it’s to prevent me from saying something or doing something that they think would be a bad look. But that in itself was a bad look,” Mrs. Cheng said.

The embassy did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Mr. Li and Mr. Albanese made statements during the press event but neither took questions from the assembled journalists.

Workers of Solar Square place a panel on the rooftop of a residence in Gurugram on the outskirts of New Delhi, India, Tuesday, Feb. 20, 2024. India is renewing its push to add rooftop solar to meet the needs of a fast-growing nation that’s hungry for energy.
| Photo Credit: AP

Just a few years ago, someone who wanted to install a rooftop solar connection in India faced getting multiple approvals, finding a reliable company to install the panels and spending heavily before seeing the first surge of clean energy.

But that’s changing. The government has streamlined the approvals process, made it easier for people to claim subsidies and pushed mountains of cash — including $9 billion announced this month — to encourage faster adoption of technology that’s seen as critical for India to reach its clean-energy goals.

“We had to get 45 signatures to set up a small rooftop solar connection in 2021,” said Shreya Mishra, CEO of Mumbai-based Solar Square, one of India’s largest rooftop solar companies. “Today it’s almost instantaneous.”

For this sun-soaked country, growth in rooftop solar can’t come soon enough. India last year became the world’s most populous nation, with 1.4 billion people and a hunger for energy that is rising fast.

Yet India, one of the world’s biggest emitters of planet-warming gases, is also highly vulnerable to climate change. Its people are affected by deadly floods, extreme rainfall, extreme heat, prolonged droughts and cyclones with increasing frequency. A study earlier this year found that nine out of India’s 28 states will be among the world’s hardest-hit regions due to climate change by midcentury.

India has grown its clean power rapidly in recent years and has the fourth-most installed renewable power, trailing only China, the U.S. and Brazil. It had 180 gigawatts as of December, enough to power about 18 million homes, with nearly half from solar.

But most of that solar power comes from numerous football-field-sized solar farms. Less than 15% comes from rooftop arrays, and India has so far managed to set up only 11 gigawatts of rooftop solar. That’s far less than the 40 gigawatts it hoped to have by 2022.

Energy experts say rooftop solar is essential to bring power to remote areas, where it can be installed cheaply where it’s needed and avoid the cost of transmitting the energy over long distances.

India’s latest push was announced by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who said the $9 billion would provide “free electricity” for up to 10 million homes.

Neeraj Kuldeep of the New Delhi-based think tank, Council on Energy, Environment and Water, has tracked rooftop solar for nearly a decade. A report from CEEW last year found that only 50% of Indians are likely aware of rooftop solar as an energy solution and most of those who were aware thought it was too expensive. The report released last November recommended subsidies for consumers who can benefit from small rooftop solar arrays but can’t afford them.

Kuldeep said consumer awareness about rooftop solar is one key to driving growth. Others are efficient governments at both the federal and state level, and finding the right “fit” for a particular user’s power needs.

Experts say another is getting buy-in from state-owned electricity companies who sometimes see rooftop solar as a threat to their profits.

Kuldeep said that’s short-sighted. The companies can often actually make more money if they help install rooftop solar in a low-consumption home, he said. That’s because they cut their transmission and distribution costs to carry power to a house with a subsidized bill that already earns them little profit.

Installations have also risen since the government launched a national rooftop solar portal in 2022 that consumers can use to claim and steer government subsidies directly to their bank account, say experts and rooftop solar companies.

Mysun, a rooftop solar company based in New Delhi, offers potential buyers a “solar calculator” on its website where they can enter their location and current electricity costs to see what kind of savings they could expect. CEO Gagan Vermani said it’s about simplifying the process for potential customers.

“We need to start thinking of (rooftop solar) with consumer needs in mind rather than thinking of it as building solar infrastructure,” he said.

Those who are already hooked up with panels on their roofs tout the benefits of cheaper electricity and greater agency over their own power.

“It is a little expensive but it’s totally worth it,” said Ruchika Chahana, who lives in the affluent Greater Kailash neighborhood in New Delhi. Chahana installed rooftop solar in her home nine months ago at a cost of nearly $5,000. She said her summer electricity bills have fallen to about $50 a month, from $200, and her family feels great about “doing something to save the planet.”

In Bengaluru, Satish Mallya saw rooftop solar as essential both to save money and avert carbon emissions. He took the lead in installing 65 kilowatts of solar atop the 120-unit apartment complex he lives in, and the building’s electricity costs have dropped $700 a month.

That 2020 installation was “challenging” because of bureaucratic hurdles, said Mallya, who serves as vice president of a citywide group that represents apartment dwellers and owners. He’s helped many others set up their own rooftop solar connections in the years since, and says the process has gotten easier.

Mishra, of Solar Square, said she’s seeing a big increase in interest in a technology that she calls “a key part of India’s energy future.”

“As an Indian and an entrepreneur, I’m extremely proud of seeing this getting built up,” she said. “I think building energy infrastructure is the greatest nation-building thing we can do.”

Unlike fission, the technique currently used in nuclear power plants, fusion involves combining two atomic nuclei instead of splitting one, generating vast amounts of energy. Image for Representation.
| Photo Credit: The Hindu

With its tangle of pipes and pumps leading to a metal pot the size of a five-storey building, Japan’s JT-60SA machine looks to the untrained eye like a contraption from 1970s sci-fi.

But inside it is a doughnut-shaped vessel where experiments done at millions of degrees could help unlock a carbon-free, inexhaustible and safe power source for the future: nuclear fusion.

“Fusion energy, the power behind the Sun and the stars, has been a great prize for energy research for decades, ever since it was first attempted in the 1950s and 60s to find some way to reproduce this power of the Sun here on Earth,” project leader Sam Davis told AFP on a recent tour.

“Not only is (fusion) free from greenhouse gases and free from long-lived nuclear waste, but it’s compact, doesn’t cover the whole landscape, and can generate industrially useful quantities of power,” the British-German engineer said.

Unlike fission, the technique currently used in nuclear power plants, fusion involves combining two atomic nuclei instead of splitting one, generating vast amounts of energy.

The process is safe and there are no nasty by-products like fissile material for a nuclear weapon or hazardous radioactive waste that takes thousands of years to degrade, its proponents say.

Swirling plasma

Taking 15 years to build in Naka, northeast of Tokyo, the JT-60SA is 15.5 metres (51 feet) tall and 13.7 metres (45 feet) wide, comprising a so-called tokamak vessel able to contain swirling plasma heated to millions of degrees.

Inside the facility, which was inaugurated in December, the aim is to get nuclei of hydrogen isotopes to fuse into an atom of helium, releasing energy, and mimicking the process that takes place inside the Sun and stars.

“With only one gram (0.04 ounces) of a mixed fuel… we can obtain an energy equivalent to eight tonnes of oil,” said Takahiro Suzuki, deputy project manager for the Japan side of the joint project with the European Union.

But despite decades of efforts, the technology remains in its infancy and is very expensive.

Currently the largest such facility in operation, the JT-60SA is the little brother and guinea pig of the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) being built in France.

According to media reports, ITER — a project run by six countries and the European Union — is years behind schedule and could end up costing as much as 40 billion euros ($42.3 billion), far more than first projected.

The holy grail of both projects, as well as others around the world, is to develop technology that releases more energy than is needed to fuel it — and at a large scale and for a sustained period.

The feat of “net energy gain” was managed in December 2022 at the National Ignition Facility at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the United States, home to the world’s largest laser.

‘Flash in a can’

But the US facility uses a different method from ITER and the JT-60SA known as inertial confinement fusion, in which high-energy lasers are directed simultaneously into a thimble-sized cylinder containing hydrogen.

“Magnetic confinement, and in particular, tokamaks, of the kind that JT-60SA is, are much more applicable to running a steady state power plant, to steady energy production as we would need,” Davis said.

“This is not just a flash in a can.”

But with the world record set by China for heating plasma to the required temperature — 120 million degrees Celsius (216 million degrees Fahrenheit) — currently just 101 seconds, there is still a long path ahead.

“Nuclear fusion can certainly contribute to a future energy mix. Exactly on what timescale is very hard to say. It will come down ultimately to how much is invested in the field (and) how much society wants to pursue this as a solution,” Davis said.

In 2022, the burning of fossil fuels provided 82% of the world’s energy. In 2000, it was 87%. Even as renewables have undergone tremendous growth, they’ve been offset by increased demand for energy.

That’s why the United Nations earlier this month released a global stocktake – an assessment on how the world is going in weaning itself off these energy-dense but dangerously polluting fuels. Short answer: progress, but nowhere near enough, soon enough.

If we consult history, we find that energy transitions are not new. To farm fields and build cities, we’ve gone from relying on human or animal muscle to wind and water to power sailboats and mill grain. Then we began switching to the energy dense hydrocarbons, coal, gas and oil. But this can’t last. We were first warned in 1859 that when burned, these fuels add to the Earth’s warming blanket of greenhouse gases and threatening our liveable climate.

It’s time for another energy transition. We’ve done it before. The problem is time – and resistance from the old energy regime, fossil fuel companies. Energy historian Vaclav Smil calculates past energy transitions have taken 50–75 years to ripple through societies. And we no longer have that kind of time, as climate change accelerates. This year is likely the hottest in 120,000 years.

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So can we learn anything from past energy transitions? As it happens, we can.

Energy shifts happen in fits and starts

Until around 1880, the world ran on wood, charcoal, crop residue, manure, water and wind. In fact, some countries relied on wood and charcoal throughout the 20th century – even as others were shifting from coal to oil.

The English had used coal for domestic heating from the time of the Romans because it burned longer and had nearly double the energy intensity of wood.

So what drove the shift? Deforestation was a part. The reliance on wood worked while there were trees. In the pre-industrial era, cities of 500,000 or more needed huge areas of forests around them.

In some locales wood seemed boundless, free and expendable. The costs to biodiversity would become apparent only later.

Also Read | High hopes for climate and energy outcomes at summit as India takes lead

Britain was once carpeted in forest. Endemic deforestation drove the change to coal in the 16th and 17th centuries. Most English coal pits opened between 1540 and 1640.

When the English figured out how to use coal to make steam and push a piston, it made even more possible – pumping water from deepening mining pits, the invention of locomotives, and transporting produce, including the feed needed by working animals.

Yet for all this, coal had only reached 5% of the global market by 1840.

In North America, coal didn’t overtake wood until as late as 1884 – even as crude oil became more important.

Why did America first start exploiting oil reserves? In part to replace expensive oil from the heads of sperm whales. Before hydrocarbon oil was widely available, whaling was depended upon for lubricants and some lighting. In 1846, the US had 700 whaling vessels scouring the oceans for this source of oil.

Also Read | India plans to export solar power: official

Crude oil was struck first in Pennsylvania in 1859. To extract it required drilling down 21 metres. The drill was powered by a steam engine – which may have been fired by wood.

Steam and muscle

The 19th century energy transition took decades. It wasn’t a revolution so much as a steady shift. By the end of that century, global energy supply had doubled and half of it was from coal.

When they were first invented in 1712, steam engines converted just 2% of coal into useful energy. Almost 150 years later they were still highly inefficient at just 15%. (Petrol-powered cars still waste about 66% of the energy in their fuel).

Even so, steam sped up early proto-industries such as textiles, print production and traditional manufacturing.

But the engines did not free us from the yoke. In fact, early coal mining actually increased demand for human labour. Boys as young as six worked at lighter tasks. Conditions were generally horrific. Alongside human muscle was animal strength. Coal was often raised from pits by draft horses.

Also Read | 57% of power generated will be via renewable sources by 2027: Central Electricity Authority

In 1850s New England, steam was three times more expensive than water flows powering textile mills. Vaclav Smil has shown industrial waterwheels and turbines “competed successfully with steam engines for decades”. The energy of flowing water was free. Digging up coal was labor-intensive.

Why did steam win? Human ecologist Andreas Malm argues what really drove the shift to steam-powered mills was capital. Locating steam engines in urban centres made it easier to concentrate and control workers, as well as overcoming worker walk-outs and machine breaking.

The question of who does the work is often overlooked. When energy historians refer vaguely to human muscle, we should ask: whose muscles? Was the work done by slaves or forced labourers?

Even in the current energy transition there can be gross disparities between employer and worker. As heat intensifies, some employers are giving ice vests to their migrant workers so they can keep working. That’s reminiscent of coal shovelers in the furnace-like stokeholes of steam ships being immersed in ice-baths on collapse, as historian On Barak has shown.

What does this mean for us?

As Vaclav Smil points out, “every transition to a new energy supply has to be powered by the intensive deployment of existing energies and prime movers”. In fact, Smil argues the idea of the “industrial revolution” is misleading. It was not sudden. Rather, it was “gradual, often uneven”.

History may seem like it unfolds neatly. But it doesn’t at all. In earlier transitions, we see overlaps. Hesitation. Sometimes, more intense use of earlier energy sources. They start as highly localised shifts, depending on available resources, before new technologies spreads along trade routes. Ultimately market forces have driven – or hindered – adoption.

Time is short. But on the plus side, there are market forces now driving the shift to clean energy. Once solar panels and wind turbines are built, sunlight and wind are free. It is the resistance of the old guard – fossil fuel corporations – that is holding us back.