Pumped storage | Crisis within a crisis On the opening day of the World Hydropower Congress 2021, the
International Hydropower Association brought together two former prime ministers in conversation. Tony Blair and Malcolm Turnbull have both played pivotal roles in putting climate change high on the national and global political agenda. Here they discuss the role pumped storage has to play in the clean energy transition
Above: Former Prime Minister of Australia, Malcolm Turnbull. The challenge for politicians - or retired politicians like us - says Turnbull, is that we all know what to do but we don’t know how to do it and get re-elected
Malcolm Turnbull: It’s good to be discussing the most urgent and existential challenge we face today which is that of global warming. I wanted to get Tony Blair’s view on what I have described as ‘the crisis within the crisis’ and that is the need for more long duration storage which is overwhelmingly pumped hydro. We now have a rush of thankfully cheaper and more effective variable renewable energy such as wind and solar, but of course they only work when the wind blows and sun shines. So, we’ve got to have a means of storing electricity. While batteries are very effective for short duration, for long duration storage we need more pumped storage. The thing that worries me the most, and both of us understand this as former prime ministers, is that long duration storage needs planning. Governments, highly political governments particularly, are often not very good at long term planning. They are mainly looking to the new cycle or the next election or even next week, and pumped hydro takes years to build because of all the planning, permitting and civil construction. Whereas variable renewables such as solar can be literally rolled out in months. So Tony, how do you see this crisis within a crisis and the need for sustainable hydropower, particularly pumped hydro?
Tony Blair: Cop26 in Glasgow is really the last chance to make some serious commitments for the future. Long duration storage is going to be essential and pumped hydro is going to be one of the principle means of achieving that. The question therefore is how do we implement sufficient projects at scale to make a real difference? I was prime minister when the Kyoto protocol first came into being. People forget this now but back then, just over a couple of decades ago, there was huge resistance amongst many counties, even to
the notion that they should take action on climate change. And there still was a lot of disputation over climate itself and was it really changing etc. There was fierce debate. We’ve moved an enormous way now, which is
great, but what’s happened over these past few years, as it has become more or less an international consensus that the climate is changing, the focus has turned. We now need action. But what are we going to do? What is the answer to it? In the end you’ve got to have answers that are practical and realistic, as well as radical. That’s the challenge for the policy makers and this is the moment you’ve got to take the climate issue out of the realms of the NGOs and campaigners, and into the realms of serious policy. Ultimately you can tell people it’s a huge problem but unless you can show them that there is a practical way to deal with climate change then, if you’re not careful, you’re proposing measures that you’ll find very difficult to implement politically. So this is why hydropower is very important as, along with several other methods of combatting climate change, it offers us the real possibility of the type of serious policy and serious implementation that we need. Unless you have that long duration storage the other aspects of renewable energy simply won’t meet the requirements of energy stability and supply. This is the challenge and is why we’ve got to look at the things you need to put in place to allow this accelerated investment and development of hydropower.
Malcolm Turnbull: People need to know that you can keep the lights on and deliver abundant and affordable electricity. I think there is also the need for the developed world to show the low- and middle-income countries the way in relation to emissions reduction.
Tony Blair:
Tony Blair served as prime minister of the UK from 1997-2007, and now is Executive Chairman of the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change. His government was one of the first to sign the landmark Kyoto Protocol under which industrialised nations first discussed cutting their emissions back in 1997.
Malcolm Turnbull is Co-Chair of the International Forum on Pumped Storage Hydropower and was prime minister of Australia from 2015-18. He spearheaded efforts to expand renewable energy generation and storage capacity, and initiated Australia’s Snowy Hydro 2.0 pumped hydro scheme.
In the end you can make the case that the developed world created the problem and so the developed world should deal with the problem, but the truth is the climate is blind to where the emissions come from. The reality is that as developed countries have cut their emissions over these past years there has been huge progress. None the less, as the developed world grows it consumes more energy. A lot of that energy is fossil-fuelled and so the actual amount of primary energy coming from fossil fuels is barely shifting. The composition of it has shifted dramatically but the level of it has remained very high. The question then is
14 | November 2021 |
www.waterpowermagazine.com
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