Tech Billionaire Makes Clean Energy Push in Australia
Australian tech billionaire Mike Cannon-Brookes wants the country’s politicians to start taking climate change more seriously. He’s putting his money where his mouth is.
Cannon-Brookes, who made his fortune co-founding the enterprise software company Atlassian Corp., is pledging the firm will get all its power from renewable sources by 2025. With Australian elections due next month, the entrepreneur is intent on driving the issue up the political agenda, calling on government and corporations to do more to tap the opportunities presented by generating and exporting clean energy.
“This could be a huge growth industry for the country,” said Cannon-Brookes, who is Australia’s third-richest person and once challenged Elon Musk to install a giant battery in South Australia to help address the state’s energy crisis. He pointed to the potential for hydrogen and ammonia exports, as well as plans already on the drawing board in Western Australia to send solar power to Indonesia via a high voltage direct current undersea cable.
Cannon-Brookes is spreading the word via the Fair Dinkum Power movement, which aims to make climate change a battleground issue in the election campaign. “If it’s one of the top two or three issues, that in itself is a win,” he said. “And I strongly believe it will be.”
For those not familiar with Australian slang, “fair dinkum” is used to describe something that is genuine or authentic. Cannon-Brookes wants to wrestle ownership of the term from coal-loving Prime Minister Scott Morrison, who has used it to describe power sources you can rely on “when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing.”
The Fair Dinkum Power manifesto says that power can be “clean, cheap, reliable and Australian.” The movement wants a faster transition away from coal, which still accounts for around two-thirds of power generation in a country that ranks among the world’s biggest carbon polluters.
Cannon-Brookes pledge to run Atlassian on only renewables would make it just the third Australian company to join the RE100 group, which includes the likes of Facebook Inc., Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Walmart Inc.
To achieve that goal, his company will look to source energy efficient appliances, from refrigerators to printers, install LED lighting and consider power purchase agreements directly with renewable power generators
Cannon-Brookes said the main opposition Labor Party’s energy plans, which include a nationwide 45 percent reduction in carbon emissions by 2030, going beyond the country’s Paris Agreement target, were a step in the right direction, but didn’t go far enough.
A shift to more than 50 percent renewable power generation by 2030 was more than possible: “If we put our backs into it, we could eclipse it by far.”
Source: Bloomberg L.P.
