For me, it is the ability to apply the “multiplier effect” to any discovery and validation that accelerates the understanding of where the potential growth and impact points of a new business opportunity can occur.
Today, we are all trying to piece together the Energy Transition.
The claim is that there are solutions abound to move us towards the Energy Transition we all need of clean, reliable, energy built upon renewables, but I honestly don’t share that current optimism; we actuaƶlly have an awfully long way to go in discovery, application and adoption. Continue reading →
I see the front end of energy as the critical feeding-in point for the energy transition. So what does this mean exactly?
The front end of energy for me is the point of discovery and validation. It is the place I feel I can make the best contribution within the energy transition. The discovery is where the stimulus and catalyst point to take an idea to commercialization.
This capturing, evolving, exploiting and exploring needs a clear management process and understanding of how to undertake this. This needs a focused innovation specialist or a systematic approach to building those innovating capabilities and capacities.
I believe there is a real gap for many organizations involved in the Energy industry; often in the recognition, they lack a real lasting, robust innovation capability, capacity and competency, as the sustaining way to help accelerate the Energy Transition journey. Continue reading →
The front end of energy, the point of discovery, is the place I feel I can make the best contribution within the energy transition, providing the stimulus and catalyst where innovation thrives. Innovation drives discovery to commercialization and this needs a clear management process
Any new idea that emerges as a concept of value is required to replace something that does not serve todayās or tomorrowās purpose. We must embrace fully this within the energy transition, creating something completely new in different breakthroughs and new business models.
My aim here is to support you: āTo achieve better, faster and more valuable future solutions with a focus on sustainability, to anticipate constant change and build different more exciting and valuable business models for lasting impact.ā
Energy needs a distinct innovation process of discovery
My belief of why innovation is vital to the Energy Transition?
I have a real belief that there is lasting value for you. In engaging, exploring and exchanging, we all gain fresh insights and knowledge. If you open up your thinking to a different view that provides a fresh and different lens of the needs within the energy transition, you add that essential external perspective.
There is nearly always a need to bridge the awareness gap or others to provide the validation. Knowledge is gained when it is shared and exchanged. I put a lot of my time into researching the energy transition.
My role is to be a ātranslatorā and take the innovatorās perspective looking for fresh opportunities, supporting and accelerating your existing ideas and concepts. We need to relate, even āgroundā thinking and determine the real value and potential.
I believe there is a real gap in building a robust innovation capability, capacity and competency to help accelerate the Energy Transition journey.
I have over twenty years of advising and transforming innovation activities; I would suggest it is not a bad resource to ātap intoā.
Innovation begins with discovery, then it moves through the innovation pipeline through its experimenting, validating, testing, often multiple trials, commissioning and eventual commercialization roll-outs.
Innovation is critical in this energy transition.
We recognize the need to move from research and development through engineering validation, then in fast iterative steps into a series of pilots constantly scaling actual solutions at speed. We do not have the luxury of evaluating these over standard lifetime returns or observing others over the years; there is the need to raise validation and take higher risks than in more stable times.
We need to be more pioneering. Without a coordinated effort, the risk is always cautious without a guarantee or point of crisis. To date, we have not generated coordination in policies, collaborations, and commitments to shared risks. We have yet to fully place in the minds of everyone what the crisis is and where it is heading if we do not respond with a real sense of purpose.
So for me,Ā the energy transition is at the forefront of ācutting edgeā innovation to deliver. Why this gets the real attention in the ways we can support the energy transition. Our contribution is to offer ways to understand, investigate, research and become even more fully engaged in this incredibly complex but exciting energy transition journey.
Our ongoing focus is to become even more conversant in the Energy Transition, to build out what we know. It can provide āaccelerating inputā into its complexity in resolving both its issues and barriers and āformulating outputsā in scope, opportunities, and magnitude of scale for contributing where possible to support each organisationās journey.
Providing a digital twin solution in the manufacturing environment is becoming a critical part of managing the complexity of those environments that many companies have to increasingly operate within.
As digital twins become critically important, entities are beginning to adopt this ātwinningā concept dramatically, and within the Energy Transition we are undertaking, it will be no different.
A digital twin enables a Utility, for example, to visualize its assets, track the constant changes occurring consistently, and make better decisions on performance optimization. Continue reading →
We are currently locked into a ābattle of energy ecosystems.ā Our very existence requires one side to win; it simply must not just survive but rebalance the planet ecosystem, the only one we have.
This current ecosystem battle is between those highly vested in today’s fossil-based energy supply system and those forcing change into a more renewable reliant energy system as quickly as possible.
We are pushing so much of the principles and theories of ecosystems to the maximum test in the outcomes we wish to achieve in the energy transition we require. We are combining technology, science, engineering and design through the network effect.
Much of what we do in the future is to find solutions that determine our future planet and what defines and achieves a healthy ecosystem in a very ad-hoc, self-determining and self-interest way. The ambitions of so many vested interests need fresh evaluations in any new socio-economic structure. Continue reading →
image credit: Changing Alisa Singer, Used by IPCC for 6th Climate Report
On Monday 9th August, 2021 saw the release of the 6th Climate assessmentby the IPCC. It is a grim, sobering read. Also, it is a staggering 3,949 pages long!
So in a short simple summary.
If we continue to not stop our carbon omissions then it will lead to devastating lives and disrupting nearly all of us humans, in one way or another.
Simply put, if we do not get Carbon Dioxide out of our energy mix as fast as we can we are, I quote from the report:
– facing increases in the frequency and intensity of hot extremes, marine heatwaves, and heavy precipitation, agricultural and ecological droughts in some regions, and proportion of intense tropical cyclones, as well as reductions in Arctic sea ice, snow cover and permafrost”
– I go on in another quote “Continued global warming is projected to further intensify the global water cycle, including its variability, global monsoon precipitation and the severity of wet and dry events”
– Then “increasing CO2 emissions, the ocean and land carbon sinks are projected to be less effective at slowing the accumulation of CO2 in the atmosphere”
– Finally, to really make my day,Ā “Many changes due to past and future greenhouse gas emissions are irreversible for centuries to millennia, especially changes in the ocean, ice sheets and global sea level”.
This leaves you grappling with what the consequences will be and what the responses of all those in a position to make the dramatic level of changes we need to irradicate all human-created carbon dioxide.
My immediate reaction is, can we honestly support extracting fossil fuels and Oil and Gas companies need to “front up” to what they need to do to make massive, effective and fast changes while they have some of the control still in their hands.
Can we continue to debate gradual shifts?
How can we recognize and mobilize real sustainable energy transitions based only on clean energy?.
Do we start calling this the Climate Emergency, which is what it actually is?
We are caught in a pandemic today, we need to learn some hard lessons from this but as the IPCC states it is “unequivocal that human influence has (and is) warming the atmosphere, ocean and land”
The scale is unprecedented these extremes such as heatwaves, heavy precipitation, droughts, and tropical cyclones, and, in particular, their attribution to human influence, will continue to strengthen until we ADDRESS climate change.
We really need to look for deep, deep reductions in carbon dioxide and other greenhouse emissions in the coming years, perhaps not decades as we have previously felt
A first reaction upping the fight to bring about real change.
I read one view: If they, the Governments and Policy Holders and the Fossil fuel producers don’t act quickly enough and COP26 ends in an unsatisfactory fudge, then the courts might become more involved.
“We’re not going to let this report be shelved by further inaction. Instead, we’ll be taking it with us to the courts,” said Kaisa Kosonen, senior political adviser at Greenpeace Nordic.
“By strengthening the scientific evidence between human emissions and extreme weather, the IPCC has provided new, powerful means for everyone everywhere to hold the fossil fuel industry and governments directly responsible for the climate emergency.
“One only needs to look at the recent court victory secured by NGOs against Shell to realise how powerful IPCC science can be.”
I also draw some comfort from this, Scientists being scientists are usually on the side of caution.
In the last report, in 2013, this ranged from 1.5C to 4.5C, with no best estimate.
This time around, the range has narrowed and the authors opt for 3C as their most likely figure. That is the bad and sad news as it is DOUBLE where we must be, aiming for 1.5C!
Why is this important?
“We are now able to constrain that with a good degree of certainty and then we employ that to really make far more accurate predictions,” said Prof Piers Forster from the University of Leeds, and an author on the report.
“So, that way, we know that net-zero will really deliver.”
Well there you go, simply deliver net-zero and we all will be saved. Has anyone seen the master plan yet?
Is this the beginning of the RIP of our world? It seems devastating?
No, but the likelihood that perhaps Humans in the form we are, how we live and function might.
So will we need to gear ourselves up for another “for and against” debate polarizing and neutralizing the urgent efforts needed? We can’t afford to wait, we need to act.
The price of inaction affects us all but to mobilize the World in today’s environment- I really feel a little helpless in seeing the way forward as the world stands in the hands of human behaviour.
The IEA states that “Cities are key to a net-zero emissions future where affordable and sustainable energy is accessible to all. The global population living in cities is expected to surge from 50% in 2021 to 70% in 2050. Cities today account for 70% of global CO2 emissions and 75% of global energy use. But with size comes opportunity.”
The report covers a wide range of opportunities, challenges and policy solutions that can help city-level governments capture the significant value of efficient and smart digital energy systems, no matter their unique context by illustration, through more than 100 examples and case studies,
The report also provides actionable guidance on ways national governments can help cities overcome barriers to progress and accelerate clean energy transitions using digitalisation.
Making the energy transition unstoppable needs massive commitments of political, public, private, and societal determination.
Innovation will be at the core of all the changes we will be making in the energy transition, be they for the current interim goals of 2030 or the ultimate one of2050, in achieving a transformation to a future where we are getting towards net-zero global Co2 emissions by this mid-century
Here lies part of the problem today to believe we might achieve these net-zero targets our planet so desperately needs to achieve. Much of the solutions required have either not been invented, scaled, or even commercialized, so are we naive or realistic in 2030? Continue reading →
Decarbonization is the critical component within the Energy Transition. We have to reduce our emissions down as fast as possible. The way we set about this will determine how we will manage the planet in the future.
Facing a climate that will become hotter, repressive and unpredictable is what we are all facing in the coming years. We have set ambitious targets to achieve the Paris Agreement as a legally binding international treaty on climate change. It was adopted by 196 Parties (countries) at COP 21 in Paris on 12 December 2015 and entered into force on 4 November 2016.
ItsĀ goal is to limit global warming to well below 2, preferably to 1.5 degrees Celsius, compared to pre-industrial levels.
To achieve this long-term temperature goal, countries aim to reach global peaking of greenhouse gas emissions as soon as possible to achieve a climate-neutral world by mid-century.
Image sourced: IEA report The Role of Critical Minerals in Clean Energy Transitions
An energy system powered by clean energy technologies differs profoundly from one fuelled by traditional hydrocarbon resources.
One real challenge is the impact on this energy transition that critical minerals will bring. These are new, different, perhaps more complex challenges to energy security. The shift to clean energy systems will bring potential new vulnerabilities.
The minerals needed for clean energy have huge questions over the availability and reliability of supply. There are a high concentration of production, long project development lead times, the worry over declining resource quality and growing scrutiny over environmental, social performance and climate risks.
These issues throw an increasing spotlight on supply sources and how critical mineral security can have far-reaching consequences throughout the energy system as we pivot towards a clean energy transition. Continue reading →
The front end of energy means what exactly?
Providing a digital twin solution in the manufacturing environment is becoming a critical part of managing the complexity of those environments that many companies have to increasingly operate within.
Decarbonization is the critical component within the Energy Transition. We have to reduce our emissions down as fast as possible. The way we set about this will determine how we will manage the planet in the future.
