Category Archives: the Energy Ecosystem

Placing context into the Energy Transition-part two

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Image credit Paweł Czerwiński
@pawel_czerwinski via Unsplash

Energy is in a massive state of change, truly global in its transition. There is a power sector transformation going on, towards a low-carbon, reliable, affordable and secure energy system.

The need is to manage the transition from the old, more reliant on fossil fuels (gas, oil, coal) into the renewables /wind, solar, hydropower, geothermal and biomass). Turning to innovation in new solutions is making this all possible.

For me, the interesting thing is that innovation is the engine powering the energy transformation and that the pace of discovery, exploration, and solution is beginning to happen at a rapid rate of demand-driven need. As someone engaged in innovation, the energy transformation story is getting really exciting.

You sense the future is changing, gaining unstoppable momentum. The difficulty for us all is this sort of transformation is at such a scale of complexity, rapid pace and variability; it is highly complex to relate too.

Here I am wanting to focus on one part of the energy transition taking place; solutions that are unlocking the energy systems flexibility. Continue reading →

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 →

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 →

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.