Category Archives: Energy Ecosystem

Managing Urban Transition

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Today 55% of the world’s population resides in urban areas; in2050, that will be staggering at 68% of the world population will be living in cities.

We are heading for an urban crisis unless we recognize the four parts of the urban transition and bring them together.

Urbanization needs to take the idea of smart, through data, and make the city intelligent.

Urban transitions are both physical and technology solutions combining. The solutions need always to change the current performance and delivery of a different sense of hope. 

So we have Four Parts needed for Urban Transition? Continue reading →

Placing context into the Energy Transition-part one

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Abstract Sandy Dessert credit: @USGS

The energy transition we are undertaking is highly complex, and it is multiple ecosystems interacting, some parts being replaced, others introduced. It has a significant “layering effect”.

We have to strip away some parts and equally add new layers but we need to maintain the integrity of the energy system (supply) at all times.

Providing energy is as embedded as deeply as you can get into the socio-economic system we are all part of. Changing the energy-generating composition is critical in reducing climate warming but it is incredibly hard to manage the transition. It is as complex as it can get.

A sustaining, dedicated effort will take us twenty to thirty years to make the “basic” transitions. To maintain it, strength it and reinforce it will be well beyond all our lifetimes, actually all of the 21st century, to (fully) reverse the global warming effect we are experiencing, and return our planet into a more balanced one where the “human effect” gets fully mitigated. Continue reading →

Australia- a global wake-up call

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Is Australia the World’s Wake Up call for radically different climate management? What is playing out in front of our eyes is the effects of a climate crisis across the whole continent. Is this a sign for us all to heed, in what it is going to mean for many of us if the world continues to warm?

In the past few weeks, we have been witnessing Australia grappling with massive bushfires fuelled by record-breaking temperatures and months, even years of severe drought.

For some time, scientists have warned that a hotter, drier climate will contribute to fires becoming more frequent and intense with the conditions being faced in Australia.

The question currently being asked is whether these fires, more intense and regular, are linked to climate change and within the control of Australia? Continue reading →

Innovation: the accelerator of energy change

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Where innovation fits within the energy transition story, it actually becomes the accelerant of change:

As you get into the complexity of this energy transition, you realize the difficulties.

Innovation will in my view be the key driver to the energy transition; it needs to deliver the following:

1). Deliver technology breakthroughs that provide renewable solutions to offer cost-effective alternatives to conventional energy technology,

2) technology innovation that improves the existing renewable technologies to reduce current cost and achieve more significant deployment,

3) new business models that allow new investors to be attracted to the energy system,

4) exploring new concepts that promote scale-up of renewable technologies,

5) supports new financing models and justification and validation for fresh capital investments,

6) enabling policies and regulatory changes to offer change incentives for different market access,

7) contribute substantially to fresh market designs and concepts,

8) encourage and provide opportunities for new energy system operators to undertake part of the transformations needed.

If ever I see a need for a shift it towards a clear innovation paradigm, it is in this energy transition we need to accelerate, support, and deliver.

Articulating the need for energy change – it is time for a new narrative

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The disappointing outcomes of the recent COP25 meeting held in Madrid still have not fully been absorbed. I cannot reconcile much of what I read about the rangling, vested interests, stalling tactics and deliberate blocking that took place.

There are clearly growing concerns that climate warming will continue to be a major “crisis” that one can only hope brings us to a united understanding of the need to radically change? Currently, vested interests are blocking the need for a concerted effort to shift our energy from fossil reliant to one based on renewables.

Today we are still caught up in the extremes of denial or over-hype when it comes to the changes demanded and expected from the Paris Agreement (2015) on the changes required to manage our climate crisis. We need to deliver a different message for us to rally around and demand change. We need to find a fresh narrative. Continue reading →

The Diffusion of Energy

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The critical point of mobilizing the energy transition comes significantly from the rate and extent of adoption of innovation. 

When you are attempting to undergo such an energy transition, the ability to recognize the “adoption” of new solutions, technologies or radically new designs of energy needs to be well understood to enable this to occur and give the market and consumer confidence.

Let me explain this a little more in this post

There are six critical focal points of the energy transition that need a broad focus. Continue reading →

Solutions for Energy do need to be end-to-end

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It is not just replacing energy sources; it is all about solution renewal end-to-end

Within the energy transition, we must not lose sight of the final consumer. We have to focus on the broader aspects of “energy transition” by re-engineering much of the existing infrastructure to create smart grids, provide storage, solar for individual homes and the ability to introduce e-mobility across the transport sector.

These are the connecting points to the end-user. They “feel” the value of the energy transition in benefit; in energy security, increased choices and greater involvement in handling their own energy costs and local energy design choices, they see the “effect of change”.

The nature of the energy landscape will require the transformation of businesses, the push to find and develop new market dynamics and embrace government policy and regulations in an orderly and planned way.

This “transformational mix” gives rise to different innovation dimensions to explore, be these enabling technologies, new business models, different market designs, and changes in the methods of system operation that make up a broader innovation ecosystem of solutions.

Innovation can accelerate progress, especially at the user-end point. Continue reading →

The demands of new technology design

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We are undergoing such a revolution that will have an impact on all of our lives within the Energy Transition. During the next ten to twenty years, we are in a race to transform our energy systems, one that moves from fossil fuel reliant to clean fuels based on renewable energy. We need to decarbonize and make energy greener.

The magnitude of realization of achieving deep decarbonization of our energy systems, the upending of fossil fuel reliance into renewables, and this undertaking of a complete energy system redesign is hard to comprehend within the time scales set.

What we do in the next ten years will determine if we can achieve the goals of reducing global warming by 2 percent by 2050. The cost of not achieving this will be significant for its impact on our lives if we do not attempt to undertake this. Continue reading →

The Energy Transition

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“Today we are witnessing the degradation of this one vital ecosystem we are all utterly dependent upon, our planet“

This energy transition is genuinely an ecosystem of epic proportions.


 

The energy (eco) system is not impacting many; it is affecting us all. We are all impacted. We do need to recognize that the energy transition, as its end product, electricity, is what we all have become highly dependent upon. Electricity is powering and linking into each of our economies, into our societies. Yet we are facing a stark choice for our earth. Continue reading →

My name is Paul Hobcraft

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Over the last twenty years, much of my research work has taken the broader area of innovation but is as I focus down in specific topic areas the value of innovation truly reveals itself.

Recently I have focused this down increasingly on the Energy Transition the world is undertaking.

Climate change, environmental degradation make solving energy through innovation as a top priority. I want to be part of that through influencing, advocating and shaping solutions

 

The aim of my work is to connect and inform.

Writing offers perspective and in this knowledge provision, I can provide greater awareness, better understanding or simply an alternative view then I am achieving through a different lens to view the energy world.

I want to is to support the individual, teams, and organizations, in their innovating activity, applying what I have gained in experiences and knowledge, to further develop core innovation understanding, so clients can achieve positive and sustaining results from their innovating activities in different areas of their need.

For me, innovation needs to enter the DNA of our organizations and our own individual make-up. In my writing, I try to offer a range of thoughts on different aspects of innovation to help each of us to understand this subject better in different aspects and applications, in this case accelerating the transformation of our Energy Systems.