According to Sims, Australia has an underrated opportunity in global clean energy trade on the basis that he believes trading partners are underestimating their future energy needs. “[Meanwhile] the sufficiency of cheap, clean electricity is overestimated,” he said. “In a few fortunate countries, exceptional renewable resources are effectively unlimited. The supply curve is low and flat – the difference in energy availability will drive mutually beneficial trade.”

It will not be a traditional energy supply model, though. Exporting hydrogen and ammonia is extremely costly and therefore trade is likely to look very different to a fossil fuel setup. Instead, Sims suggested that clean energy will be exported via energy-intensive products such as iron, aluminium, silicon and polysilicon, ammonia and urea, and green fuels for shipping and aviation.

"Australia should be supplying green products that will lower global emissions by up to 10 per cent," he argued. "This is not an extraordinary number when you consider our land mass and resource availability. If we do not do this, it will be significantly more expensive and politically challenging to meet the world's climate ambitions."

Guy Debelle, investment committee adviser at Australian Retirement Trust, agreed that Australia needs to think about the strategic opportunity available in how it can embody “green electrons” to the rest of the world.

He called out the green iron industry specifically and referred to it as one of Australia's "greatest endowments" – especially due to the country’s reserves of magnetite ore. He pointed to South Australia as a good example of the right kind of headway. On the Eyre Peninsula, there is a significant deposit of iron ore combined with access to wind and solar power, a port and other existing infrastructure.

“The South Australian government has worked out that this is a huge opportunity for the country, which would be insane for us not to take advantage of,” Debelle argued.

In this context the Australian sustainable finance taxonomy has a big role to play in funnelling capital where it is needed, Debelle added – by helping push finance to the areas where Australia has a comparative advantage. The taxonomy “provides the framework to encourage capital to move into these opportunities”, he said.

Nathan Fabian, chief sustainable systems officer at UN Principles for Responsible Investment, added that the taxonomy facilitates a conversation about transition that has previously been unavailable in such a specific way. For instance, it includes financial metrics for capex and revenue alignment with climate goals.

“There are the tools the markets need to do their jobs,” Fabian said. “We are now able to distil what is transitioning the company or the activities it performs... we all know gas is not green, but if it enables a demand side activity to reduce its emissions by 60 per cent [we can] understand the transition pathway. It doesn't make gas green, but I know why we are using it.”

This is important because most of the heavy lifting left to do is in transition rather than green finance, Debelle argued. This is a point that is often lost, particularly in Europe. “If we could all move seamlessly to green solutions – happy days. But decarbonisation is a pathway not a step-function down,” he said.

Debelle highlighted the contention that surrounds mining as a transition activity as an example. “The Australian taxonomy is the first to address mining. A lot of people have trouble getting their head around mining as an activity that can be financed as transition. But the fundamental thing – and what I think, unfortunately, Europeans mostly don't take into account – is that when steel turns up in Europe it came from somewhere. Originally, it was some rocks in the ground, and often the ground of the Pilbara,” he said.

• This is the second of series of articles covering discussions at the IGCC conference that will be published by KangaNews over the coming days. Read No stopping energy transition now – despite Trump by clicking here.