South Australia’s lost opportunities

It is easy to be critical after the event so this comment is to raise an opportunity for the South Australian Government which is right here and now. It is an opportunity which has been around for many years but due to lack of understanding continues to be overlooked.

That opportunity is to use South Australia’s very strong electronics industry capability to promote the broad technology strength which is available in this state.

Government bureaucrats continue to insist that SA does not have an electronics industry despite the fact that there are around 300 SA companies manufacturing their own designed products and providing electronics enablement to our local industries. It appears that the problem is in the data recording of industry activities by the ABS.

There is not a category for electronic products as such. Since our industry provides the technology which enables most other industry products to work the output from these companies is recorded under their category by the ABS.  This means that the locally developed intellectual property which is included and which gets a large ROI does not get recognised. Thus what we call our Electronics Industry does not exist in the minds of the SA Government staff.   e.g. automotive electronic products are recorded under Automotive etc. So, how does it feel being part of an industry with 300 companies, 10,000 or so employees and an output of around $4 billion but is not seen to exist because of bureaucratic mindsets?

One of the problems of this is that the Government cannot fully promote the state’s technology base to the world. California has Silicon Valley which is largely seen as electronically enabled and is world renowned. I am suggesting that, if the Government could get past this blocking technicality, it could promote the state more comprehensively as a one stop technological solution to potential clients.

Unfortunately this mind set prevails at all levels and we are regularly told that there is no electronics industry in South Australia! This is despite the fact that electronic based manufacturing activity is about 3 times more productive than all other SA industry, based on our own industry statistics.

Another missed opportunity is that of solar generated electrical power.

One thing SA has is lots of solar energy which is substantially non-polluting and its availability is distributed around the state. Why are we not taking more advantage of this resource? True we are, as a community, installing rooftop solar at a fair rate but this is being complicated by issues of feed-in of surplus power to the grid and currently some apparently dubious operators giving it a bad name.

This could all be overcome if Governments were to macro-implement solar generation for distribution via the grid. An example already exists in a very large planned solar array near Tennant Creek will be capable of supplying 10GW of power.  It is almost beyond belief that the majority of this is going to Singapore. It is a privately funded project and will supply some power to Darwin on the way through.

See:  https://www.pv-magazine.com/2021/01/29/major-milestone-for-worlds-biggest-solar-project/

Whilst I support some investigation of our solar system, I cannot see how it is productive to be spending vast amounts on putting people on an inhospitable planet like Mars ahead of solving our power generation problems.

We are selling coal to be burnt overseas (with corresponding CO2 emissions) and patting ourselves on the back saying that we are keeping our carbon dioxide emission under control. Yet Governments are also talking of a ‘Gas Lead recovery’. Has nobody yet worked out that gas is a hydrocarbon which produces lots of carbon dioxide when burnt.

Why have Governments not seriously looked at the benefits of a hydrogen economy? Professor Derek Abbott of the University of Adelaide has written a book which describes the benefits in detail and is very convincing on the matter. Japan is strongly moving this way and is a country with limited land area for solar arrays and nowhere near the solar radiation that Australia has so it will have to import most of its hydrogen. Derek Abbott points out that Australia receives enough sun to power the entire globe. So why are we not at least powering our country with this via solar generation. He points out also that we could actually power quite a lot of the world by exporting surplus hydrogen either in compressed form or as ammonia gas. The beauty of burning hydrogen is that it produces only water as a by-product.

So we have to ask why this is not happening. I suspect most of the problem is political because of the impact it will have on employment in areas where coal is mined. This is no trivial issue and needs to be addressed. As it happens, many of these areas also have substantial sun exposure so why do we not set up the solar arrays there whilst the coal industries are wound down. An oversimplification, but what are the alternatives? Sir David Attenborough has implied that, if we wait until 2050 for zero emission, it will be far too late for the planet to recover. Australia has an opportunity to significantly bring that date forward sufficiently to save at least our part of the world. We just have to get our priorities right and, instead of just mindlessly defending jobs, take a path which will solve our greenhouse gas problems within an appropriate time.

South Australia has the opportunity to set an example to the country and the world.

By: Clive Pay – Former Manager of Electronics at Regency TAFE College