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?

Recently the Deputy Prime Minister Michael McCormack dismissed climate change as the concerns of “raving inner-city lefties” and “we have had fires in Australia since time began.”

Scientists are arguing this climate denial is “passing the buck,” and Australia, like so many other countries, are not doing enough to stem the rise in global temperatures and the politics around this is causing growing concern, the world will pass the point of human intervention in managing rising temperatures.

The science of global warming is complicated.

If you take Australia, it is only partly in their hands and partly not, until climate change has some real effect, and that is years or even decades away. It needs concerted global coordination. not just national commitments that seem, today, lacking.

The main climate driver behind the current heat causing more significant bush fire and drought problems in Australia has been a change occurring in the Indian Ocean Dipole (IOD) where events are creating rising sea surface temperatures to be warmer in the western half of the ocean, closer to Australia, pushing cooler temperatures towards the Indian subcontinent, where they are experiencing the opposite, floods and heavy rains.

The concern is, will this change in the sea temperatures be more a consistent one where both Australia and the Indian subcontinent suffer these climate issues on a more regular basis. Extreme heat and the increased severity of natural disasters such as drought or flooding are not in the hands of one nation or another; it is in all our collective hands.

The other climate effect is being caused by the Southern Annular Mode (SAM) in the Southern Ocean. A change is causing the westerly winds that circle the Southern Ocean to shift southward toward Antarctica, causing rain-bearing winter cold fronts to pass south of the Australian continent

Climate variability is pushing the Australian climate toward a more fire-prone state. The present conditions have become the perfect storm for wildfires. Long-term climate warming, combined with years of drought, colliding with a set of climate patterns that deliver severe fire weather. Recognizing these trends are happening more frequently in patterns across the world, needs a shift in policies to combat these in multiple ways.

What is getting more exposed by witnessing these disastrous bushfires in Australia is an inadequate response to growing natural disasters. Policies are lacking in any coherence in immediate response, in sustaining approaches to managing this growing phenomenon. Increasingly there is the need to form a comprehensive roadmap to achieve climate change through radically different energy policies or combating climate issues.

Many solutions are in the hands of Australians. They are themselves, contributing to their own heat problems in a lack of renewal to address a very changing climatic set of conditions.

The use of different energy initiatives is lacking a concerted effort in reducing emissions, in their homes, in their energy sources, and in their conservation of resources. This can change but it needs policies linked to a concerted action plan to get this going.

Lacking commitment to the Climate Accord is not facing up to a confronting real lasting change

What we are seeing evolve in Australia, is a lack of determined commitment to the Paris Agreement, signed in 2016, that requires all Parties to put forward their best efforts through nationally determined contributions (NDCs) and to strengthen these efforts in the years ahead by keeping a global temperature rise this century well below 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. Australia is not alone in lacking the resolve to “undertake best efforts”

The present Australian policy is to look after their national interests of supporting the continued exploitation of coal.  Coal provides 60% of Australia’s electricity, 50,000 jobs, and was the country’s biggest export. The Australian government has backed coal-fired power, despite the recommendations of a major report on climate change and numerous others where the phasing out of coal is considered crucial to limiting global warming to within 1.5C, a goal agreed to in the Paris Agreement that had Australia as one of the signatories.

Is Australia running from the back of the pack for implementing different climate policies? It does seem so.

From what I read the Australian government to climate change in its commitment is tucking into the back of the climate change pack coming out of the COP25 meeting recently, in not wanting to change policy initiatives, undermining the climate ambition and blocking the progress for better response to this global challenge.

Australia, it seems, is not wanting to undergo a real transition from fossil fuel reliance into renewables. Or in harnessing the use of sun and wind and insulation of their buildings to counter the changing warming. In their rejection of climate change issues that they can “effectively manage,” they are seemingly in denial.

What we are witnessing in the heat of the fires raging across Australia is a harbinger of what most of the world will face in not recognizing the effects of global warming and not having a comprehensive co-ordinated global plan to make a successful sustainable energy transition, over the next twenty to thirty years.

If we wait too long, we will find it extremely hard to regain control over the effects of climate change and global warming without major consequences. The costs to the Australian economy are again, sacrificing the long-term to prop up the immediate, and I feel that is not a winning strategy.

Moving towards life-support might be what we are witnessing is occurring in Australia

Are we seeing the early effects of countries, determined to play national politics and tie all of our global future to their coal or oil resources? Is it going to be events like the bushfires raging in Australia that are signaling our environments are on a life-support system? The biodiversity of millions of species of plants and animals is fundamental to our health, well-being and fuel the economy, not what some are so intent on extracting and taking out of the ground.

Australia offers such incredible diversity- is this changing?

Australia is first and foremost one of the world’s global diversity hotspots, but it is under extreme stress. We are making ecosystems much more vulnerable.

Will vast swathes of Australia become uninhabitable if the temperatures continue to climb?

Humans derive so much from the natural assets; the environment provides the food we eat, the air we breathe, the water we drink. It is through designing this ecosystem to be based on a shift to effectively harnessing the wind and the sun we can, given global determination, the chance for the ecosystems we depend upon to allow time for them to regain the balance necessary.

You do not achieve that through denial or taking what you can get today as immediate gain. We must put our planet back into balance. It is a lack of sustained, thoughtful policies that need to be put into place, and at present, we do not have this political commitment at all.

We are witnessing all our futures in what is playing out in Australia.

Australia is being transformed before our eyes. A continent that has such incredible beauty, diversity and raw nature is becoming a global hothouse and the forerunner of all are futures of floods, fires, natural disasters by not dealing with the effects of our present climate warming.

Nature seems to find a way to “bounce” back but it needs time and conditions to enable this. As humans, we have to play our part to provide the conditions to allow the diversity to thrive, not be threatened by our constant intervention, and we must learn to value our ecosystems far more, it is all interconnected.

A wake-up call or a sign of what is to come?

Australia can be our wake-up call if you appreciate what is being played out, we are escalating more natural disasters and are in so much danger in what we are losing. The IPBES warns that the global decline of nature is occurring at a rate unprecedented in human history. More than one million species globally are threatened with global extinction, many within a few decades. Australia is in the top seven countries responsible for 60% of global biodiversity loss.

It could be different but what we will do in the next ten years will determine this but being held to national politics and moving from one energy-sapping crisis to another is going to be a rough decade ahead and giving us all a very hard time in a resolve to make essential changes to our lives.

We need to invest significantly, and our world is going to go through some life-changing events. How many national catastrophes will make us realize we need to radically address the issues of our planet. Welcome to 2020.

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**** Primary sources for this post have been the current news drawn from the BBC over the past weeks that have been focusing on Australia on the bushfires and the different effects and issues these are exposing. There are many others to draw down from. A brief update on climate issues was made on 3rd January 2020 by me.

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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.

The longer we “fiddle,” the harder this transformation will become to manage our growing needs of more energy, from an increasing world population and maintaining aging infrastructure, still reliant on very outdated central energy grid models and only fossil fuel solutions.

All of this ambition to change the energy system needs a radical approach, lots of fresh thinking, and that underlying coordinated action for all involved to undertake such a journey. The question is, will we, can we?

The societal inhibitor is a real impediment.

Technology-centric innovation can make a difference, but in this case of the Energy Transition, in the end, it is Society that has to demand it, at present, there is more outrage than momentum. At present there is indifference.

Societies still have not been presented with a compelling case for change. Is it when we have more floods, power outages, hurricanes, power and water shortages that we will finally get it at political levels as well as finally forcing those vested interests to admit to the inevitable in transforming our energy supply? The concern is this might be far too late and our plant is in a path that we cannot recover to what we have known, we will only have to tackle the consequences in a rapidly changing world.

To galvanize governments, investors, private organization, and institutions, we need to create these needs of change to become part of the dialogue we need in our fabric of society today, we need to raise global consciousness. To achieve a transformation where we are aiming for a zero-carbon outcome in thirty years is unparallel in ambition.

To undertake this energy transition is as tricky as any global initiative we have taken on before. Our institutions need to be galvanized, not by the voices of science or technology, or by individual governments or private organizations they need the “United voice of all nations through its people.”

A united voice where people demand change and demand Governments construct the new world order, to integrate, coordinate the full gambit of interventions in economic, political, technological and social systems to make this energy value chain realizable as a significant part of reducing the climate crisis of depleting resources, warming temperatures and natural disasters, caused mainly by carbonizing our world.

Can we find this united voice?

It is hard to believe we will at this moment of time but if we fail to unite around resolution for the predicted global climate during the next 12 months we will find it extremely hard to avoid the accesses of global warming, deteriorating air quality and the significant loss of so many species that make up our planet that is endangered today.

In Glasgow from 9th November to 19th November 2020, we have the COP26 (Conference of the parties). It is a pivotal, hugely important meeting, called for under the auspices of the UN’s climate change, serving as the meeting of the Parties to the Kyoto Protocol (CMP 16) and the third session of the Conference of the Parties serving as the meeting of the Parties to the Paris Agreement (CMA 3).

Society has to demand the adoption of these agreements in 2020. We can’t afford to push this decision further “down the road”. The narrative for making changes to our energy system needs to be radically different and even more tied to climate issues, security and protection of what we know and should value.

We need to inform far more our immediate priorities, and the reasons why they are critically important otherwise, the energy transition will stall. If this happens we face a very different set of global problems we are not equipped to handle, our survival. This may sound grim and over the top but actually, it will be. It becomes “highly” unpredictable.

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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.

The six main thrusts for technological innovation within the Energy Systems for today’s energy transition are:

• To accelerate the deployment of renewable energy technologies throughout the system.
• There is a real need to find innovative solutions that focus on the end-user sectors of transport, industry, and buildings.
• The technological and digital innovative solution needs to focus on the overall system design and operation needs.
• Innovation needs to increase electrification through emerging solutions on the digitalization of the grids and provide grid-scale energy storage for resolving variable renewable power.
• To push, nurture, and facilitate different energy sources to provide solutions to scale them up. These include battery storage, solar power, geothermal, biopower, hydropower, onshore and offshore wind and finally tidal power.
• Lastly, innovation needs to achieve an affordably decarbonize industrial transition

Besides technological innovation, there is growing potential for redesigning operational systems through new services, tools, and distributed generation deployment. There are equal opportunities to find fresh market designs that have built into them demand-response models that can provide more significant differentiation in tailored services.

Changing the design of the energy system can also offer the exciting potential of designing new business models that look to co-creation, provide more flexible power purchase agreements and bring the consumer into the system as aggregators in their own right. Many of these are solutions that continually unlock the system’s flexibility.

The diffusion of innovation is essential to understand to eventually achieve scale.

The Characteristics of an Innovation Diffusion

Let me explain briefly the theory of diffusion. It is a theory outlined by Everett  Rogers.

As we call for more technological innovation in the energy transition, the value of Roger’s diffusion of innovation becomes essential to appreciate.

Roger’s theories certainly stand the test of time, and I want to refer to the Characteristics of an Innovation Diffusion here as it is highly relevant to technology innovation diffusion in the energy system for going through an adoption process.

He characterized these as 1) Relative advantage, 2) Compatibility, 3) Complexity, 4) Trialability, and 5) Observability. Let me briefly explain these:

Relative advantage is the degree to which an innovation is perceived as better than the product or solution it superseded. This is in cost, financial payback, utility, convenience, or advantage. In his theory, the higher the perceived advantage, the faster the rate of adoption

Compatibility is the degree in which an innovation is perceived to be consistent with the existing values, experiences, and needs of potential adopters. As we change our “norms” in energy solutions and our values and appreciation of the requirements to change, there is a constant search for growing compatibility. The more it can be seen as compatible, easy to adopt, the more likely it will be considered as a progressive solution.

Complexity. Complexity is the degree to which an innovation is perceived s being challenging to understand or use. Those solutions that are more straightforward, more intuitive or a no-brainer will be adopted more rapidly than those that have high levels of new skills, knowledge and operational experience

Trialability is the degree to which an innovation can be experimented with on a limited basis. Something we trail or pilot represents less uncertainty to potential adopters and clearly can allow adopters to learn by doing. The value of trials, pilots, and prototypes will also be adopted more quickly than those which cannot. The value within such a highly evolving market like energy transitions, the functional effects can be related to the risks of the dysfunctional. Avoiding undesirable consequences helps the rate of adoption, where new technology has many unproven aspects.

Observability. Observability is the degree to which the results of an innovative solution are visible to others. The easier it is to see the benefits, as real and tangible, the more likely it gets adopted. The epidemic model applies here. When innovation spreads is when it is adopted and valued, and having contacts with users of the solutions significantly helps diffusion.

The call for increased technological innovation

The need for accelerating the energy transition will be highly reliant on organizing the technological innovation pathway. Innovation is far broader than just R&D; it will also come from business models, changing existing policies, processes, and market design to provide the impact necessary for the changes we need in the energy system.

As we search for enabling technologies that facilitate the integration of renewable energy, accelerate storage, explore sector coupling, introduce new ways to operate within the electricity system, seek out new power generation, design the grids for increased flexibility and digitalize solutions to provide further services, tools and distributed generation deployment knowing how to diffuse innovation in these general five approaches becomes valuable.

It becomes valuable to design technological solutions to be able to “travel this diffusion path”; it gives market confidence and encouragement that the innovation story is designed to take decisions through this innovation adoption approach for the solutions the energy transition has to pass through.

Appreciating how innovation passes through its design can help accelerate the “right” innovations and “separate” the wrong ones, which is partly based on this valuable innovation diffusion check. It can help adoption of new innovations.

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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.

A very critical piece of the energy transition puzzle is the necessary focus on the end-user sectors of how we work, live and be connected to the need for energy change. It is the transport, industry, and buildings we “interact” with that make energy transitions real. We want to see what different energy provides.

Otherwise, any transition is a “hard sell” Here, it is the combination of new system designs and ways to operate, combined with technological innovation. We need to achieve the most pressing need to undertake greater energy efficiency and effectiveness at the consumption end of energy.

The increased electrification of these end-user sectors of transport, buildings, and industry are providing new designs for energy systems to operate can give increased reliability, lower costs and greater efficiency.  

The solutions offered are placing increased emphasis on digitalization so that the system design is managed on a  more decentralized and democratized participation and that enables better control and management of our costs, choices and uses.

These energy choices are beginning to break up previous monopolistic providers in power generation. Passing the choices of energy design closer to the end-user has the exciting prospect that allows us as energy users, to potentially participate in the energy market, in choice of energy supply and a growing opportunity to sell off excess energy if we are self-generating our energy. The changes are transforming energy management as the end-user is potentially becoming very engaged in the whole transformation of their energy.

The end-user market of transport, buildings, and industry is predicted to be making a shift of their primary energy supply from the present 15% of renewable energy to 65% by 2050. The share of Renewable power is expected to rise to 85% by 2050 (source: Irena 2018 “Global energy transformation report”) and that adds the recognition that our energy is being sourced by sustainable and clean energy means.

The design of energy systems needs to bring closer to the end-user the utilization of mini-grids to enable greater flexibility and participation in energy co-operation between transmission and distribution system operators. These designs are building the two-way flow where excess energy can be delivered back to the grid.

The role of innovation to translate the end-user need into reality within these sectors of transport, buildings, and industry will involve changes in system designs to digitalize grid services, build more local and grid-scale energy storage, deploy significant charging solutions for electric vehicles. Access to clean energy needs to be as transparent and energy availability on-demand, reliable and abundant to our needs.

These innovations needed are galvanizing change, they are the catalysts of any change. Energy becomes one of increasingly managing the lifecycle design and transition, innovating end-to-end so energy is constant, affordable and always available.

We need a robust design of the end-user market for the energy transition, in my opinion;  that comes partly from telling the emerging innovating story for energy solutions in exciting and effective ways based on offering clear roadmaps of energy design.

The end-user is becoming critical to “enable” the energy transition.

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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.

The need is to allow time for new technologies to commercialize.

To undertake something like a global energy transition, you need time; time to figure it out, validate the options and pathways and then provide the necessary time to pilot, learn and then commercialize the (multiple) solutions to be scaled and applied. The cost of this transformation will eventually run into trillions of dollars.

The innovation aspect needs to gather momentum. Technologies are emerging based on several solution needs:

• Ones that are grid edge in design, meaning more customer-facing and power-flow controls
• Radically different storage technologies that can handle the variances in renewable of holding the supply of solar and wind generating energy as well as converting energy through electrolysis, hydrogen and synthetic fuels that serves the needs of mobility, heating, agriculture
• The present gas and steam turbines need to be upgraded, optimized, converted and have applied hybrid solutions that combine different energy sources, various technologies that combine to provide mixed energy source power plants
• The advancement of carbon capture techniques and carbon removal
• Exploring next-generation nuclear fission and fusion
• Finding different solutions that allow high-temperature superconductor transmission and solid-state transformers to be introduced increasingly into the energy system
• Increasing the transparency, reliability, and resilience through the application and use of sensors, monitoring, analytics, and self-learning systems to increase efficiency and effectiveness.
• Finally, putting to use digitalization for machine and device connectivity, managing growing complexity in overall systems

Each of these “demands” new technology design.

They need to be economically viable and scalable and need to drive a clean energy transition and provide increasing systems flexibility

These new technologies need to break into the existing lifecycle of energy design to substitute incumbent solutions. The speed of development and deployment will be unprecedented for use to meet the climate goals, decarbonize the system, and change the fuel source. Fuels that are based on renewables or green alternatives that can continue to use existing fuels of coal, gas, or oil that allow for carbon capture or removal.

Innovation will be at the forefront of the energy transition. This will be both radical and full of breakthroughs to achieve the goals set to decarbonize our world.

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The existing solutions found in wind and solar solutions jockeying to replace oil, gas, and coal, in our present electricity distribution, as well as our current customer solutions for managing our energy, will only take you so far in our need to change our energy systems.

If we are to meet the mandated Paris Agreement of 2015, where member states agreed to limit global warming to 2 degrees C versus pre-industrial levels by 2050, we have to look at every climate change mitigation we can find. We have to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 80 to 95 percent of the 1990 level by 2050.

Today the solutions are centered on decarbonization, applying digitalization, and switching to an energy system that is more decentralized than at present. It is finding imaginative, innovating solutions that become essential to achieve this climate change through the energy transition we are undertaking.

We must find innovative solutions to reduce local air pollution, strengthen the energy security and develop a more significant energy system that is resilient to minimize the shutdowns and power outs. We need to find solutions to reliable and sustainable energy solutions that deal with heating, lighting, cooking, and cooling. Any change needs to find a way to create local economic value and jobs, as others in any change of this magnitude will be displaced.

We need to switch from fossil fuel into renewables, and the whole shift of significant invested assets for power generation and distribution have to accommodate an energy mix that provides us electricity certainty 24 x 7.

As we switch from conventional power to renewables or we look to upgrade the distribution grids, we need to look towards innovative solutions.

Everything we are looking at in energy solutions faces a scalability challenge.  We must continue to de-carbonize challenging industry sectors like steel, pharmaceuticals, and chemicals or our transportation systems if we wish to achieve any positive outlook of curbing carbon emissions and move onto a pathway towards a zero-carbon future.

Where can innovation help?

The opening answer is everywhere within the energy system. Technological and systemic innovation is incredibly important to the end-user sectors of transport, industry, and buildings, as well as replacing and upgrading much of the overall system design and operation to generate increased electrification.

We need to digitalize our grid services, provide new concepts for the grid and local storage, provide improved smart charging for electric vehicles, add different ways of building into the energy system the idea of mini-grids.

Each day there seems some level of innovation development, but my aim here is not to list these or where they need to go in future but to take a broader view of where and how innovation can help in general terms

Innovation has a central role to play in the energy system.

Our need is to keep pushing for discoveries, for experimentation, for demonstrating. We must nurture innovation, and we must continuously look for ways to facilitate its pathway. Innovation is made up of many enabling technologies; it needs to be built in a highly systematic way. The need is to continually look for re-imagining new market designs and business models to stimulate the changes and solutions for our future energy transformation.

Energy is a vital part of any country’s ability to be competitive. Today half the world’s capital is invested in energy and its related infrastructure as it is the backbone of any industrial and urbanization strategy.

Our economic prosperity will be determined by transforming the energy sector, and it is through innovation we will achieve this.

Innovation is vital to the integration and operation design of the energy system, and we need to recognize its crucial role.

Welcome to my posting site where I focus on the Energy Transition we are all undertaking, especially where innovation will form a growing part of this transformation we are all involved within.

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