This week your intrepid hosts braved some interstate travel craziness (the things we do for you) and came together IN 3D REAL LIFE AND EVERYTHING to bring you this pod from Wurundjeri land.

We have been loving the energy twitterati folks having at our ISP episode and in response to our follow up question “what would you want to see in a supercharged ISP?” we received plenty of excellent fodder from friends of the pod Emma, Tom Quinn, Craig Memery and more! A no-surprises tech scenario, a supercharged electrification/green hydrogen one as well as the fraught question of a just transition and how all this necessary infrastructure is to be paid for. Gulp.

Our truly hipster choice for this week’s pod was to eschew the boringly mainstream Victorian Gas Substitution Roadmap and instead dive into one of the reports that fed into it… Infrastructure Victoria’s report ‘Towards 2050: Gas Infrastructure in a Net Zero Emissions Economy’. Thank you to dear friend of the pod, Rob Murray-Leach for recommending the 190-page-report-disguised-as-half-that-size 😬. Love you Rob!

Frankie’s One More Thing was to reconvene GAS CRISIS CORNER and flag the truly grim situation that continues to develop in Europe as Gazprom announced they’d be lowering the flow of gas through Nordstrom 1 into Germany down to 20% capacity, prompting responses to limit heating and hot water use in pubic buildings to conserve gas reserves ahead of the European winter.

Tennant’s One More Thing was a speech given by Dr Steven Kennedy PSM, Secretary to the Treasury, on the Australian Public Service and Academia to the University of Sydney. Dr Kennedy chose to focus his reflections from his extensive career as a senior public servant on climate policy, and the importance of academia in providing unbiased advice and expertise on different mechanisms to drive action. 

AND as an unexpected bonus, Tennant engaged in a rap poetry twitter-off with the aforementioned Rob Murray-Leach to summarise the energy crisis in rhyming couplets by reworking Boney M’s “Rasputin”. Who won? You decide!

Luke’s One More Thing was the incredibly exciting development of the Australian Renewable Energy Agency’s mandate being formally expanded to include energy efficiency and electrification! So uncontroversial was this change to ARENA’s regs there have been no objections or shenanigans in the Parliament (it might also have something to do with it not being bundled with other more contentious issues *cough CCS cough* as it was the last time this was attempted).

See you next time! Please keep tweeting your thoughts and suggestions for new papers to us at @LukeMenzel, @TennantReed and @FrankieMuskovic. Or drop us a note at [email protected]!

And for those reading along at home, our next ep will be on “The Economics of Immense Risk, Urgent Action and Radical Change: Towards New Approaches to the Economics of Climate Change” by Nicholas Stern, Joseph E. Stiglitz and Charlotte Taylor, published by the National Bureau of Economic Research.