Many of us have wish lists or resolutions as we get towards the end of one year and think about what we want out of next year.
So I decided to do a top of the mind wish list for the Energy Transition
Now we all can add to this but here are my nineteen wishes for kicking off 2022 in a focused way for the Energy Transition we all need to gather momentum, in really serious ways. Can you improve on this wish list?
Some of the ideas or thoughts are in the links provided. Happy holiday reading! Continue reading →
We have just finished the most critical COP meeting in Glasgow. It was the eleventh hour. For two weeks, nearly two hundred countries entered into discussions, finally agreeing on the “Glasgow Climate Pact” to keep the 1.5 degrees C target alive and finalize the outstanding elements of the Paris Agreement.
The President of the proceedings, COP26 President Alok Sharma, commented, “its pulse is weak, and it will only survive if we keep our promises and translate commitments into rapid action.”
“Keep 1.5 alive” has been a rallying cry for diplomats and activists alike at the COP26 negotiations. The phrase refers to the goal of limiting the global temperature increase to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above preindustrial levels.
1.5 degrees Celsius is seen as the threshold beyond which the effects of climate change become increasingly dangerous to people and ecosystems. But scientists warn that time is running out for humanity to take the transformative steps to achieve the 1.5 goals. And according to multiple estimates, the deal negotiated in Glasgow does not bend the curve enough to get there.Continue reading →
I have been reading IEA’s World Energy Outlook 2021 (WEO), issued a month earlier in October, specifically because of the COP26 Climate Change
Conference meeting in Glasgow in a few weeks time.
This is the IEA flagship report, a 380 plus page report has for this year’s edition of the WEO been designed, exceptionally, as a guidebook to COP26.
It spells out clearly what is at stake.
This COP – short for the Conference of the Parties, the main decision-making body of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change – is particularly significant. This COP session is being held between 31st October to 12th November 2021 and perhaps is the most pivotal climate meeting to date. Why?
It is the first test of the readiness of countries to submit new and more ambitious commitments under the 2015 Paris Agreement. It is also an opportunity – as the WEO-2021 states – to provide an “unmistakable signal” that accelerates the transition to clean energy worldwide.
I wanted to “lift out” of the report a few very short but essential messages provided in this report that give the essential snapshot. Continue reading →
Since I launched this dedicated posting site www.innovating4energy.com, in December 2019, specifically around innovating in energy, I have written 80 plus posts. Each post was undoubtedly a fundamental learning point for me as I attempted to dive deeper into the topic.
Within this, Hydrogen has been one of the main contributors. Including this post, I have written about different aspects of Hydrogen over ten posts, but most were during 2020.
Then I suddenly “went off the boil” on Hydrogen. I felt a sense of hijack from the Oil & Gas Majors and the Equipment Suppliers, all pushing hard the interim solutions blending different gases for offering blue Hydrogen as the necessary bridge, over the next ten years or so.
I felt a sense of “lock into” as the investment to purchase gas generating assets and infrastructure can run for thirty or more years. That’s not interim or intermediate and is likely to stay blue as CCUS will get added on at the later stage as the logical option to complete a ROI on this “interim” decision
Clean energy, growing the potential of Electricity – Image rights RethinkX
I have been absorbing a couple of interesting research reports from RethinkX, an independent think tank that analyzes and forecasts the speed and scale of technology-driven disruption and its implications across society. They produce impartial, data-driven analyses that identify pivotal choices by investors, business, policy and civic leaders to stimulate thinking and promote avenues of disruptive change.
Firstly on Rethinking Climate Change on how Humanity can choose to reduce emissions 90% by 2035 through the disruption of Energy, Transportation, and Food with existing technologies.
Secondly, the Energy Report – Rethinking Energy 2020-2030 100% Solar, Wind, and Batteries is Just the Beginning states we are on the cusp of the fastest, deepest, most profound disruption of the energy sector in over a century. Like most disruptions, this one is being driven by the convergence of several key technologies.
Both of these reports are well worth the time to really read and absorb. This is some “sterling” work by Tony Seba, James Arbib, Adam Dorr and other members of the RethinkX team.
So where do you “sit” on this report and the acceptance and realities of the proposal in time, consequences and complexity?
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 actuaölly 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 today’s or tomorrow’s 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: “To 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.”
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 “translator” and take the innovator’s perspective looking for fresh opportunities, supporting and accelerating your existing ideas and concepts. We need to relate, even “ground” 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 “tap into”.
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, the energy transition is at the forefront of “cutting edge” 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 “accelerating input” into its complexity in resolving both its issues and barriers and “formulating outputs” in scope, opportunities, and magnitude of scale for contributing where possible to support each organisation’s 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 “twinning” 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 ‘battle of energy ecosystems.’ 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 →
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.
