Free events

Imagine a future life where your smartphone, watch, airpods and your electric car were automatically charged without you even knowing. What would it be like to give up control to an external system which optimises your energy use, decides when a robotic vacuum cleans your home and even when your electricity is available. Or are these even realistic or desirable futures?

This film explores how people living in Australia see their future lives in a country where increasingly extreme weather, concerns about public health, growing levels of technological automation, and a society dependent on digital media are set to create uncertainty about demand for electricity in the future. The filmmakers follow the everyday lives of five households to ask how they are inventing their own ways to live with emerging technologies, imagining and planning for their own futures in ways that might complicate the ambitions of industry and policy makers.

Energy humanities is a field of research with highly relevant and timely practical applications. Scholars and practitioners investigate how to make energy transitions just and inclusive, for all people and living beings, everywhere. Critical contributions from the social sciences, humanities, and the arts help us understand who benefits and who experiences harm from decarbonising our societies, whose values and visions count and whose are sidelined, how disagreements are negotiated, and how fairer worlds can be imagined and joint visions pursued.

In this webinar, Professor Petra Tschakert will draw attention to what often remains out of sight in discussions around just energy transitions, namely inequities, structural disadvantage, and uneven positions of power when embarking on energy futures, and the human and non-human winners and losers they entail. These are essential questions we need to engage with in order to approach the needed ethical, lifestyle, organisational, and policy choices we make, now, at this critical junction on the path to renewables and net zero emissions.

The concept of a “social licence to operate” (SLO) has dominated the public discussion around a just energy transition, leaving companies to grapple with the idea of securing approval from their host communities and others outside their organisations. This presentation will discuss the limitations of the social licence to operate approach and advocate for a deliberate move away from social licence to operate, to the more robust and holistic approach known as social performance. Social performance supports more sustainable developments through understanding local context, comprehensively assessing risks and opportunities, supporting meaningful engagement and working with communities to secure mutual benefits. A social performance approach starts from the earliest planning phases of a project and persists all the way through to decommissioning and closure. It is a continuous process with regular opportunities for review and improvement. Proponents who commit to social performance are focused on transparency and better outcomes for their projects and communities. The scale and pace of the energy transition presents a clear opportunity to apply the key principles of social performance. The presentation will provide an overview of how this can be done and include some case studies for discussion.

30 minute webinar followed by 15 minute Q&A.

Come check out the ground-breaking energy innovations and meet the researchers behind the science as we tour the energy labs at the Australian Resource Research Centre.

The tour will include three laboratories:‍

Geomechanical laboratory: a world class research facility that undertakes Geomechanical testing of core samples for science in the Energy sector.

Monitoring with fibres: a laboratory developing technologies to monitor and verify that the CO2 is permanently stored in the subsurface. These technologies rely on sensing instrumentation deployed on the field either at the surface or underground.

CCS research virtual reality: CSIRO’s WA-based energy team is at the forefront of researching methods for direct air capture carbon capture, carbon use technology, storage and monitoring. Go behind the scenes and meet the scientists working to discover how these technologies can contribute to a low carbon future.

Don’t miss out. The tour is limited to 40 people.

Imagine a future life where your smartphone, watch, airpods and your electric car were automatically charged without you even knowing. What would it be like to give up control to an external system which optimises your energy use, decides when a robotic vacuum cleans your home and even when your electricity is available. Or are these even realistic or desirable futures?

This film explores how people living in Australia see their future lives in a country where increasingly extreme weather, concerns about public health, growing levels of technological automation, and a society dependent on digital media are set to create uncertainty about demand for electricity in the future. The filmmakers follow the everyday lives of five households to ask how they are inventing their own ways to live with emerging technologies, imagining and planning for their own futures in ways that might complicate the ambitions of industry and policy makers.

What will our future lives look like with energy and emerging technologies? How do households and consumers see their own futures unfolding? How do experts and scientists imagine and envision energy visions? And what do we need to know now, to plan for and anticipate possible energy futures?

In this webinar panel presentation, the Monash Digital Energy Futures research team will present their ‘Scenarios for Future Living’, based on four years of research with Australian households. The four scenarios (Creature Comforts, Sharing the Load, Hunkering Down, and Sunrises and Siestas), set in the years 2030 and 2050, provide plausible and speculative visions of everyday life likely to impact on energy demand and forecasting.

The presentation will be followed by a panel discussion with Western Australian energy sector experts and leaders as they discuss findings from the Digital Energy Futures research project and implications the scenarios present for WA energy consumers and the energy sector.

The clean energy transition is humanity’s biggest ever economic challenge. In his book Powering Up, former Australian chief scientist Alan Finkel shares his insights for leading the way in the global transition to clean energy.