Atlassian co-founder wants to buy Australia’s biggest polluter to make it green
wsj.com
wsj.com
An observation I've read online is that MCB can wait 6 months and rebid for less, the future for AGL is very rocky. If the liberal government lose power in the coming federal election their assumptions about price support are toast.
Coal powered electricity has been in decline since the 5 minute bidding came into law, and before. It's also horrendously unreliable now.
Problem is then the company may have split (as they are planning), or locked in that process. He doesn't want to buy half of AGL is my understanding, he wants it as a whole.
The price has been on the decline for some time though who knows where it goes next: https://www.marketindex.com.au/asx/agl
I consider this at best a decent attempt at making amends (assuming tax dollars go towards the greater good, which they largely do in Australia), and at worst just virtue signalling for something which was never going to happen in the first place.
Or you could just tax people buying a used car for 9k, fixing it up, selling for 10k, at 10% of revenue…
I couldn't agree more. I've always paid my taxes, not that I had a choice.
AGL is more at risk of shutting their coal plants down because they can't afford the coal than because of any boardroom activism by M C-B.
Although I would be buying coal mines if I had that sort of money. Not to shut them down, but to get rich.
[0] https://www.barchart.com/futures/quotes/LQ*0/historical-pric...
Either way, Atlassian speeding things up a little might have a positive impact. Either way, the Australians could do more to nudge their country towards being a bit less dependent on burning stuff to keep their ACs going. It's not that hard. Most of their cities are close to oceans (with lots of wind power) and the continent is well known for having a lot of exposure to sun light throughout the year. Also, it does not have much of a winter even in places like Melbourne and Adelaide on its South coast, which have a latitude (37 degrees South) that is comparable to that of places like California (Santa Cruz), Northern Africa, etc. in terms of amount of sun light.
…If you're rich enough to be buying coal mines, aren't you already rich?
Can’t burn coal if nobody sells it to you.
AGL is responsible for about 8% of Australia's greenhouse emissions.
The buyer's claim is that AGL is unable to make the transition quickly because they lack capital and say they'll be investing 20 billion.
https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/q-and-a-can-mike-can...
Cheap coal would seem to be more of an issue for his takeover plan.
The large thermal coal producers in Australia eg Whitehaven or Yancoal probably have a nett negative worth at this moment. Yes, they are currently selling coal for a high price but that will not last more than 2-3 years. Then the mines are worthless and you have a huge clean up bill.
Using most DCF models the mines are worth nothing or less.
These are the current prices for "futures". The date is when the coal will be delivered.
As the delivery date nears, the price for the contract will converge to the spot price (assuming there is a spot market). For the dates in the past, the price shown is the last price before trading of that futures contract was halted.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-09-27/why-china...
The demand for power in Australia doesn’t get any lower by shutting down a power plant. The only thing that will happen is that the other power plants will ramp up to keep up with the demand. A true solution would be to provide new installed capacity to the grid that would price out the existing assets. And if the new capacity is less CO2 intensive than you lowered the emissions.
Question is what is that other source? If generation of the renewables is lower than peak load (times a reasonable factor like 1.5) than you build renewables. Otherwise you focus on bringing power from hours with lots of renewable generation to the rest of the day aka you build energy accumulation. If the accumulation solution is too expensive (either CAPEX or OPEX) than you have to invest in lowering that down. If you lower that down with your money, it will become more favorable for others to build this solution around the world. Others will come and build this solution of yours. This way you effectively lowered way more emission for the same money (assuming you will come up with something reasonable).
https://www.smh.com.au/business/companies/brookfield-cannon-...
https://www.smh.com.au/business/companies/agl-rejects-cannon...
What has killed these projects (although Xlinks are seemingly still releasing press releases on a regular basis) is the radical shift in the relative prices of the components. Laying HDVC cables under the sea was and remains expensive while the price of solar PV panels has dropped by nearly 90% in a decade.
As a result, the economics don't really add up any more. The capacity factor for a typical solar PV panel in northern Africa is about double that of one sited in northern Europe. But this increased efficiency cannot be exploited. It's now significantly cheaper to simply install twice as many PV panels in the north of Germany than install half the number of panels in the Sahara AND build 1000km of transmission to get the electricity to the markets in northern Europe.
There are other disadvantages also; the energy security is much worse - having transmission lines passing through a bunch of other countries - some of which are politically unstable. Also sub-sea interconnectors take years to provision - you might be looking at a decade long project while siting the panels locally means a year or couple of years project at most.
But as you say, it seems much better to build much more solar power capacity locally. If the local utility makes ammonia (or some other form of storage) to store for the winter, that seems to make more economic sense.
You end up importing power over 2000km from the cheapest solar resource in the world (~20% power loss panel-to-home), or maybe import green ammonia to burn in generators (same panels, installed in Australia, ~70% efficiency loss).
Of course both alternatives are more expensive than cheap coal. And if you are are a grumpy old man, go ahead and vote to delay and defer and deceive.
One the other hand, he helped create JIRA.
But given how many genuinely evil SaaS companies there are, I think it bears clarification that Jira does not do anything more evil than being a shitty product that people are forced to use by their bosses. They are not, for example, potentially responsible for the eventual collapse of civilization (which cannot be said of the Facebooks and Googles of the world).
If Atlassian had the opportunity to become a Google-like company, threatening humanity's existence, as you suggest, Cannon-Brookes wouldn't have stopped it. He would in fact pursue it, become a trillionaire and then use a good portion of the money to do charity or green stuff to make it up for the evil he's done.
It's what our culture tells people to do since Roman Christianity values were imposed mainstream. You don't have to do it right, just regret, donate your wealth and ask for forgiveness.
The actors in the story have changed. There's no confessionals anymore, for instance, but the underlying story is the same...
This is tantamount to saying, "All companies of equal size are equally evil." Or maybe it's: "No one has morals, given enough opportunity to become wealthy."
While I think there is some sort of trend there, you have no justification to speculate that Cannon-Brookes is not an outlier. There are lots of people who are more moral than other, less-wealthy people.
He wouldn't be able to stop it. That's a fact. Diluting himself by taking loads of VC, subjecting himself to a money-driven Board. He just wouldn't be able to stop it.
You can argue he would have not pursued it, that he'd step out before his company became sort of an evil Facebook. My opinion is that the moment he accepted the fact above, it tells me he wouldn't step down. He'd profit from it. And later use the money for good causes to "compensate" and look good to society.
I accept he could have been an outlier, just don't think it's remotely likely.
This is like arguing that pencils and paper are evil because Trello (or whatever) exists.
Jira is slow, but it's faster than what people did before it.
And I have efficiently built and shipped ~10 projects on Jira, so I know it's not that bad.
I use ClickUp now, and Jira is maybe 5-30 seconds slower per action than Jira. It adds up to, maybe, 30 min of saved time per day across my whole team.
That's not my experience. Most of what people do on Jira is stuff they just didn't do before; there's no benefit, only cost.
> And I have efficiently built and shipped ~10 projects on Jira, so I know it's not that bad.
Hmm, did you have access to edit workflows or something? It can be "not that bad", but the defaults and the way it nudges people mean it's bad unless you - or rather, all too often, the person above you - is making a serious effort to ensure it's not bad.
It’s not that JIRA is awful. It’s just that it’s not that good, and I don’t understand why it became popular, let alone Unicorn popular.
But good luck to them. They got an outcome most of us only get to dream about. And MCB is at least (apparently) doing good with that money, instead of spending his fun time stealing land in Hawaii.
IIRC one of the motivations Paul-Henning Kemp said to be having is to optimise software so that the world is greener.
While Bitbucket has some good reasons to be a performance hog (better diffs), I can not say the same about JIRA nor Confluence.
So even if Atlassian tools around the world used as much processing power as all the datacenters in the US (of course in reality it's orders of magnitude less), the carbon saving of a 20% reduction would only be 6.3Mtpa, or 15% of AGL's emissions.
1. https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/abfba1
1. https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/abfba1
Do you genuinely believe that Atlassian could be a significant polluter at the scale of AGL?
This article isn’t about Atlassian at all, feels like the wrong place to complain about JIRA.
I am not sure, where you got the impression, that my comment was supposed to be funny in any way. Maybe you are over-interpreting a little. It is rather supposed to express sadness about the state of things. I think it is our right to hint at such things, whenever an offender like Atlassian is mentioned. Their bad practices need to be exposed and talked about.
> Do you genuinely believe that Atlassian could be a significant polluter at the scale of AGL?
I never said anything about "on the scale of". Where did you read that? I am saying, that Atlassian is a big offender and energy waster through their bad software.
But they really aren’t. It’s companies like AGL that are the big (or perhaps mid-size) offenders.
Suggesting that Atlassian is a big offender in this context is simply ridiculous. They’re a submicroscopic offender.
Atlassian is a big offender in terms of page load times and energy consumption associated with that and therefore energy waster through their bad software. In the realms of how much energy you can waste with a bad website, they are probably somewhere close to crypto currency miners while loading any of their pages, since they give multiple cores a 100% usage at page load time.
Just because you put something into relation with something even bigger, it does not suddenly become no longer a problem or irrelevant. If we went by that methodology, we would never fix the tail of not-the-biggest offenders. We need to fix things on all ends. Offenders stay offenders, even when there are much bigger offenders. It is only right to also call them out for what they do and what I witness day by day. It is as well a hint at others, who also waste lots of energy with their bad websites. It is not only Atlassian. There are many examples of basically rendering a static page with a few words, but loading multiple seconds for that.
Confluence search for me is one of the worst offenders: takes forever to load and can't find anything I want. Confluence is where data goes to die.
Better to build an entirely new product from scratch.
We had bugzilla and a variety of others and they were pretty horrible back in the 00s. Then Jira came along and it was modern and fast (-ish), then I guess they followed the route of multi-b(m)illion clients that wanted X, and got it, at the cost of speed and simplicity for the rest of us.
Perhaps we're at another inflexion point for another better, faster, bug tracker (or maybe github's built in one has eaten that market). Just like IM, IRC -> YahooIM/MSN Msger -> Slack/Discord/Teams, or editors notepad/vim -> emacs/notepad++/sublime -> vs code.