Australia, reflects Matthew Warren, is once again the lucky country because it is one of two or three countries in the world whose fossil fuel assets allowed it to get to where it is, while also having an abundance of non-fossil fuel energy resources.

The Clean Energy Council’s newly appointed CEO says “We’re so rich in non-fossil fuel energy sources. We have everything on the table so we should and could be an incubator of all these technologies. And by pitting them against each other they’re going to get a lot more efficient a lot faster.”

In the rapidly expanding and fast-paced clean energy industry, Mr Warren has a lot on his plate but he is quick to identify problems and set his mind to a solution. “The single great challenge is to make all these technologies as cheap and affordable as possible so that we can not only do it easily in Australia but we can get these low cost technologies into developing economies as quickly as possible. That’s a really easy and clear guiding principle,” he says.

From waste through debate to energy

Mr Warren has a diverse environmental policy CV that has seen him work in challenging spaces with a need for quick solutions.

After working at The Australian in the late 1980s and early 1990s, he studied economics. His thesis on waste disposal and recycling took him through the waste debate to The Australian Food and Industry Council where he was Policy Director for four years.

Investigating the energy used in the production and manufacture of different products, Mr Warren says the Food Council found that while packaging can be a big problem, it’s also a big solution.

“The only way to solve the problem,” he explains, “was to look at how much energy was being used; what’s the greenhouse emissions; what’s the water consumption; what’s the waste; what can you save and recycle? And then saying right so what do we need to fix?”

In 2004, Mr Warren went to work for the NSW Minerals Council where he tackled the greenhouse debate first hand. The industry, he says was always trying to change, to make coal less polluting but still stay in business.

He explains that his frustration with the state of the environment debate drove him back to The Australian in 2006, to move the debate on from simply demonising coal as a dirty fuel to engaging people in mature debate to find better solutions.

“I saw this as an important debate we needed to have about what role coal plays in Australia’s economy, what role it plays in the future, what role mining plays in Australia’s economy and understanding that it’s got some big impacts that need to be dealt with,” he says.

While at The Australian, Mr Warren watched as the environment debate changed within weeks from discussing waste to transport, climate science and then as it developed into the complex climate change and environment discussion we now read and hear about every day. He started as the newspaper’s only environment reporter, when he left earlier this year, he says he was competing to get his stories into the paper.

Having witnessed and helped to inform the debate, Mr Warren says that more than Nicholas Stern’s Stern Review: The Economics of Climate Change and Al Gore’s 2006 film, it was the drought that galvanised Australian thinking, causing many people here to accept that the climate was changing with unwanted consequences.

“Because the hard thing with climate change is it is invisible; it’s slow and I think people probably know where the science is at but they actually have a sense of tangibility about it. Things look different and they sense that it’s real and that’s driven the politics. I don’t think we’ve seen anything like it. It’s quite an extraordinary transformation.”

In the business world, Stern’s report was really important because he clarified the risk question, Mr Warren explains. “There was a huge uncertainty about what you do in the face of this uncertainty – both in the scale of the uncertainty and the consequences. And using his metrics Stern said: it’s a no-brainer. The risk is so great that this could be catastrophic. Even if you’re not sure the science is right, you still act.

“That galvanised business thinking. Business at that time was always aware and doing a few things, but I think they got the risk debate because no one could counter that.”

He adds that while business moved ahead of [former Prime Minister John] Howard back in 2006, the former Prime Minister was left still trying to hold the line that we didn’t need to act on this; that there was time.

With many laying the science of climate change debate to rest, or at least accepting the risks faced if it is real, Mr Warren says people are now thinking about the action and mitigation challenges. What is wind and how does it work? What are our solar assets? Where did the solar industry go and what do we need to get it back? Why is it expensive and how do we make it cheaper? How do you implement a carbon market?

He says that the noise from the corporate sector is the same noise that was coming out of the NGOs two years ago, except that today it is a tougher market to break through.

“It’s a much harder game now because there is so much happening and it’s dynamic and you’ve got to actually be constructive and not just create noise for the sake of relevance. It’s a tough gig; I get that,” he says.

Supporting a maturing industry

Just as the debate and discussion has moved to questions of action and mitigation, Mr Warren has moved to lead the Clean Energy Council’s efforts and help a rapidly growing industry by offering plausible solutions that will implement change.

“The industry is maturing. It’s growing up very quickly and it’s evolving from being driven by people who are passionate early adopters and who have committed their lives to it, to this emerging agnosticism,” he says.

He says that his role with the Council, is to create the framework in which clean energy companies can grow and compete with each other. He says that cost is the great challenge of climate change and, like any other industry, dynamic tension and competition are required to make it competitive.

“Australia can and should be saying you’ve got to compete in this [market],” he explains. To do this, the right policy settings need to be achieved.

“Everyone agrees it’s a no-brainer to do but it’s an incredibly challenging space and I think that’s going to be a major priority for the organisation in the next year or two.”

Moreover, to be credible in Canberra, he says the Council has to represent the entire industry, not favouring one sector or technology more than any other. The Council must be technology neutral; ensuring that everything it says and does is consistent with an overarching set of rules and principles that absorb information from all its different sectors and create a policy body that doesn’t favour any technology but ensures clean technologies are in competition with each other as well as those outside the Council’s representation.

Developing such an overarching policy is something that will evolve over time, but Mr Warren explains that getting it right is really important right now.

This by no means hinders the Council in supporting and lobbying for particular technologies and Mr Warren is sensitive to the different issues and support requirements of various technologies within the industry.

“We should find out as quickly as possible which [technologies] are going to work and which ones aren’t. At what cost they’re going to work and bring that process forward as quickly as we possibly can.”

With representatives from most sectors of the industry on the Council’s new board – elected in November 2008 - Mr Warren is confident the organisation can deliver practical solutions for governments to implement.

“How do we start planning a really credible plan that makes it easy for government to say ‘yes, this looks like a pretty good plan,’” he says. “You can’t just keep throwing money at any technology or industry. There are constraints and we’ve got to be smart and make sure that everything is used as efficiently as it can be. If it’s just seen to be rent seeking, we won’t get very far.

“We’ve got to stop that perception that we’re complaining about everything. If we don’t like something let’s find out what we want and what will work and then propose that so that it makes it easier for governments to work with the industry because we’re helping to solve problems. I think we’ve been doing that but we’ve got to make that really transparently clear.”

Finding solutions

Like the industry, the major challenges facing the Clean Energy Council are ones of scale and pace – trying to address all the issues while the race to a low emissions finish line is on.

Mr Warren says the key challenge is to evolve good solutions quickly that work across the diverse industry and address the issues facing its different technologies.

Solar hot water and insulation; developing new technologies; keeping small dynamic technology companies in Australia; fostering the right framework to get some action on the ground in terms of installation of existing technologies like PV and wind; and thinking through and getting sensible policy ideas on energy efficiency are just some of the items on the Council’s agenda.

“There is a lot of activity going on,” he says. “The question is how do we engage with that and make it better. If things aren’t working, how do we steward them?”

Working sensitively with governments at the state, territory and federal levels is an important part of progressing change. Key to this, says Mr Warren, is working with the political situation as it is.

“We have state governments that want to do their own thing, that have unique traditions and that are going to be interested in acting in this space. While we want some national consistency, we’ve also got to be realistic about their expectations and their stakeholders – how we work with them to make sure that they can deliver constructively.”

When it comes to the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme (CPRS), Mr Warren highlights the race to the finish line as a particular problem for the industry. The scheme, he says is an example of the rushed job of delivering climate and clean energy solutions.

While he speaks highly of the Rudd Government for honouring its commitments, Mr Warren says that in hindsight, investing in clean technologies before committing to dramatically changing the economy may have been the safer path forward.

He says a frustration filtering through the industry is that while the Federal Government couldn’t be more supportive and enthusiastic about energy reform and transformation, they’re trying to do too much in too little time.

Heading straight into delivering something as complex as the CPRS, he continues, risks creating a gap between what the government has promised and what it delivers. “They risk having this industry stuck in limbo for up to a year simply because they’re so loyal to the dispatch of their promises,” he says.

Mr Warren is open to the idea of a soft start, if the alternative is bankrupting the economy and limiting investment in new technologies.

“That’s why we’re [the Council] getting the supporting framework of strategies and policies – getting the renewable energy target, getting investment in clean technologies – in place so quickly because you can move the transformation along just as fast as if we had an $80 per tonne carbon price without having to put one on.”

Investing in the development and deployment of clean technologies is, as Mr Warren would say, a no-brainer.

“We shouldn’t die wondering what we might have done with different technologies,” he says. “And every technology has the capacity for enormous breakthroughs if they are just given that opportunity.”