In this episode you’ll discover some of the game changing, practical solutions designed to bring down our emissions, and find out how they’ll have a positive impact on 2030 targets.

We unpack the innovation and ideas that will make a renewable energy future more achievable for everyone: from electrifying everything to using space tech for more efficient rare earth mining, and from rethinking the life cycles of critical minerals to an attempt to create an all-electric suburb.

Show notes

Within the episode we refer and quote statistics from the following reports;
CSIRO’s survey Australian attitudes toward the renewable energy transition,
and Clean Energy Australia’s Australian Rooftop Solar Breaks New Ground In 2022: Clean

Guests

• Saul Griffith, co-founder and chief scientist at Rewiring Australia.

Rewiring Australia is a nonprofit, independent, non-partisan organisation dedicated to representing the people, households and communities in the energy system. Griffith is the author of The Big Switch: Australia’s Electric Future and Electrify: An Optimist’s Playbook for Our Clean Energy Future. He is also the founder and chief scientist at Otherlab, an independent R&D lab. He helps government agencies and Fortune 500 companies understand energy infrastructure and deep decarbonisation.

• Laura, volunteer at community organisation Electrify 2515.

The Electrify 2515 project was formed to start a pilot electrification study in a local community. It is made up of volunteers from the 2515 postcode, who are working closely with Rewiring Australia staff to try to create Australia’s first all-electric suburb.

• Flavia Tata Nardini, CEO and co-founder at Fleet Space Technologies.

ExoSphere by Fleet won a Good Design Award Best in Class for a commercial and industrial product in 2022. Fleet Space Technologies describes it as a first-of-its-kind, passive, non-destructive mineral exploration solution that combines three radical technologies – ambient seismic noise tomography, low-power satellite connectivity and intelligent cloud processing – to discover critical resources 100 times faster than traditional methods, while drastically reducing the requirement for environmentally damaging elements.

• Dr Chris Vernon, senior principal research scientist at the CSIRO.

Vernon leads the CSIRO’s critical minerals portfolio. The CSIRO claims to be the largest minerals research and development organisation in Australia and one of the largest in the world.

Further reading

• Clearing the air: how to get your household off gas

• Electrifying the farm: ‘It could add a couple of hundred thousand to our bottom line’

• Offshore windfarm zone off Illawarra coast given green light in bid to ‘power Australia’s clean energy future’

• Funding Australia’s renewable transition isn’t ‘picking winners’ – it’s securing our future

• How Australian households can go electric, cut emissions and save money

• Every household will go on a journey of electrification. We can make that easier, or harder

Credits

Future Labs: Moonshot 2030 is produced by Guardian Labs Australia for Polestar.

Writer and host: Veronica Milsom

Lead producer: Alison Tanudisastro

Executive producer and script editor: Justine O’Donnell

Additional research and fact checking: Sonam Thomas

Podcast artwork: Jacob Taylor