The search for stability with all the disruption and dislocation. Alamy Stock Photo
How do you reassure those worried that significant changes to their energy system will lead to the inevitable disruption and dislocation none of us like? How can you deal with this to elevate some of those worries? How can we manage so much change occurring to give some level of stability and continuity?
Addressing concerns and reassuring individuals or organizations worried about potential disruption and dislocation resulting from significant changes to their energy systems requires a thoughtful and empathetic approach.
Putting together some areas that are avenues to explore to reduce the concerns, build support, engagement and contingencies are suggested here.
The art of leapfrogging accelerates the Energy Transition
Any search for advantage or validation of making a change must consider the art of leapfrogging, especially in the Energy Transition we are all undergoing.
Leapfrogging can accelerate the rapid and transformative progress toward a more sustainable and efficient energy ecosystem that provides advantage and customer identification.
Leapfrogging done correctly offers the benefits of evaluating existing solution options, considering the added value of environmental considerations and enhancing access and resilience in a rapidly changing world needing faster adoption of cleaner energy solutions to accelerate your solutions.
Where leapfrogging really ‘scores’ is offering the ability of a developing or less developed country to essentially “skip” less efficient and higher carbon-intensive technologies during their energy development.
Leapfrogging provides a significant opportunity to develop and cut carbon emissions simultaneously, it is vastly underrated and considered. We love reinventing the wheel when there is often no need.
Leapfrogging is when developing countries industrialize with renewable energy instead of non-renewables.
Equally, companies can learn and adopt from others to reduce their own research and development costs and long lead times, across a wide range of technical improvements in renewable and storage technologies, grid balancing, use of software management, saving running costs by searching for leading or emerging best practices.
Also it can be by taking certain component parts of a solution you can accelerate and adapt to upgrade parts or finding blending solutions that fit your circumstances.
The Energy Transition is probably the most challenging undertaking we need to take in a short time frame of thirty years. to give our planet the chance to regain balance for us to live in and protect what we have.
To get there, we will need to chase a crazy pursuit of existing, competing businesses, all vested in how we do things, to gain their attention and convince them of a sense of urgency and need for a rapid change from the existing to a preferred, based more on renewables, as our principle source of energy.
Equally, I need to undertake a more focused approach. I have recently revamped my thinking towards the Energy Transition. Click on the tabs within this posting and website to understand the changes that need to be undertaken centred on innovation as central to this.
Different companies have different understandings of the changing energy ecosystem; some are narrow in their views and very focused on their business, others seek to break out and become more recognized, while others still want to be seen as leading. What and how do you pitch to each?
In this third post of a mini-series of three, I want to explain this further through a value proposition of how community energy can work and the realism that proposes a radical rethinking of how we are thinking about the present-day Energy Transition and shifting this from a centralized approach into this transition of a decentralized community that generates, consumes, perceives and owns its energy destiny.
This radical concept envisions the energy transition as a living, evolving entity that bridges technology and nature, sparking profound shifts in how communities generate, consume, and perceive energy. It challenges established norms and prompts a complete reimagining of our relationship with energy and the environment.
My underlying thinking is through ecosystem thinking and design, triggering innovation engagement and activation strategies to promote innovation and change the energy transition dynamics within a community setting, offering decentralized community energy.
Empower Your Community’s Energy Future with Decentralized Energy Cooperatives
In this second post of a mini-series of three, I want to explain this decentralized community energy concept further: “This radical concept envisions the energy transition as a living, evolving entity that bridges technology and nature, sparking profound shifts in how communities generate, consume, and perceive energy. It challenges established norms and prompts a complete reimagining of our relationship with energy and the environment”.
By introducing the concept of the “Energy Transition Nexus: A Living Energy Organism” and how it challenges the conventional approach to the energy transition:
While the concept described in my first and introductory post, “Envision Energy as a living, evolving community,” is indeed a radical departure from the existing way we see energy delivery and its transition, it takes an essential step in connecting much of the parts of the energy transition, its importance to our living.
I feel it is essential to bridge the gap between the natural world and the business world in a more closely aligned way, going beyond existing frameworks or thinking but still grounding this into business-orientated understanding to relate more.
Let’s explore a business-oriented, yet still disruptive, approach that brings a conceptual leap to the energy transition with this decentralized community proposal while maintaining some degree of continuity with business practices but set in an ecosystem way of thinking and design:
In this first post of a mini-series of three, I want to introduce a radical concept that envisions the energy transition as a living, evolving entity that bridges technology and nature, sparking profound shifts in how communities generate, consume, and perceive energy.
It challenges established norms and prompts a complete reimagining of our relationship with energy and the environment. It focuses on the community in a decentralized way for its energy.
My underlying thinking is through ecosystem thinking and design, triggering innovation engagement and activation strategies to promote innovation and change the energy transition dynamics within a community setting, offering decentralized community energy.
It comprises the following parts to consider shifting our thinking away from the presently accepted, more highly centralised thinking on energy provision into community enablement. It is conceptualized upon the following thoughts:
The energy industry has many problems transitioning from fossil reliance to renewables.
Any energy transition is a massive shift in the energy supply.
As our energy consumption continues rising, we face several global challenges. The primary sources of our energy production will need to change as carbon emissions and warming greenhouse gases continue to amass in the planet’s atmosphere, creating a more unstable world we live in today. Traditionally, we have been heavily dependent on mainly three types of fossil fuels in use for energy generation: coal, oil and natural gas are all non-renewable sources, depleting the planet’s resources.
The continued burning of fossil fuels for electricity, heat, and transportation is giving levels of carbon intensity that need to be dramatically reversed as this continues to put pressure on rising temperatures and a warming planet. We have this real need for an effective energy transition built on electricity supplied by renewables. Renewableenergy sources offer cleaner alternatives based on solar, wind power, hydroelectric energy, biomass from plants, hydrogen and fuel cells and geothermal power.
We need to build different energy solutions to resolve the current grid difficulties of accommodating variable power sources like wind and solar energy, the fastest-growing renewable power sources. As these resources begin to supply increasing percentages of power to the grid, integrating them into grid operations will become increasingly difficult.
We are in numerous world crises; the erratic weather patterns are causing droughts, floods, and high extremes of heat or sudden cold; less productive land and the oceans of the world are heating up, and that has progressively a dire consequence on our food chain.
We are still caught up in this fruitless debate of shall we / shant we switch away from fossil fuels, especially while we are (seemingly) in an energy crisis. We need to radically switch away from fossil fuel now period!!
We have worse to come. All these crises are heading us towards a world that will become increasingly difficult to live in as humans, to produce enough food or uninhabitable for many animals or species we have around us that increasingly are facing extinction. Then what about nature itself? I find it very hard that humans seem to ignore so much and just seem to want to carry on as usual. We as humans have induced climate change, we have less than twenty to thirty years to attempt to reverse it.
Is the needed path to the Collaborative Energy Transition ApproachthroughGrand Challenges?
I have to admit that I am sceptical of individual energy organizations’ pledges to move toward a carbon-neutral future. They argue that there is a limited amount of time to make this transition, yet it is broadly recognized that individual organizations cannot achieve this alone. Are energy organizations open enough to alternative suggestions for overcoming the resource and knowledge constraints working alone can bring? Are they exploring alternative thinking enough, such as organised collective challenges? We need to bridge the gap through collaborations at multiple firm levels.
I believe there is a weakness in the energy ecosystem that deprives it of more significant collective action and innovation to achieve a more accelerated pathway to the energy transition. My argument is that while many energy companies are working on solutions within the energy transition, they often work in isolation and struggle to get out of their “self-made” islands of knowledge.
I suggest that applying ecosystem thinking and platform solutions could bring together many organizations to work in broader, more ambitious innovation ecosystems of collaborations or even work through grand challenge-designed approaches.
