Tag Archives: Technology innovation

Building an Inspiring Energy Narrative

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I struggle increasingly with individual energy organizations’ pledges of moving their solutions towards a carbon-neutral future. The mixture of reports, initiatives, and viewpoints all move towards the transformation of the energy system but they all admit or fail to address TWO crucial aspects.

Firstly the limited time we have to make such a transition in their offerings of new and different imaginative ways to change the current dynamics within our energy systems. Secondly how each organization alone cannot achieve it with limited or no alternative suggestions to how to overcome this “constraint”. Well, this post is about one alternative well worth considering.

One area of potential to bridge is the collaborations at the multiple firm levels. There is a weakness that deprives the ecosystem of a greater “collective action and innovation” to achieve a more accelerated pathway to the Energy Transition.

The Energy Transition has a rich network of complimentary ecosystems all keeping the energy transition change moving at a ‘certain’ level of momentum but is it good enough, I don’t think so.

The sheer number of Energy companies working on solutions within the Energy Transition is vast, varied and geographically spread. Each is struggling to get out of their (self-made) islands of knowledge to grow their business value through mostly individual innovation solutions.

We then have an Ecosystem of Governments and intergovernmental organizations providing policy suggestions and directions, offering sources of analysis, central data collection and interpretation along with proving reference and exchange points and forums. Then you have general and highly specialised Consulting firms, and investing institutions that are all constantly providing insights and supporting solutions.

We need to find new ways of collaborating and that means applying ecosystem thinking and platform solutions. Let me suggest one as an opener to this thinking.

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Thinking about the Energy Transition

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Thinking about the Energy Transition

One of the largest News Agencies recently asked me about the Energy Transition. These were some really tough open-ended questions: “What are the industry challenges and solutions,” “the key trends and developments“, What are the Challenges I face,” then “What critical solutions are there to the challenges” and finally “What value and guidance would you offer.”

The energy transition is a vast, complex area to view. I took a deep breath and thought about how I would break this down over a discussion of only 45 minutes. I decided to break it down into bite-size chunks such as Key Challenges, Worries, Big Ticket issues, My working issues, and finally, How the energy industry needs to get organized.

On reflection, I realized how many more points I could have raised or explained. Still, the structure of my breaking this down allows for some further thinking and additions that help me build this out, as many struggles with absorbing this energy transition, and I can build on my initial reactions here. Well, that is in my plans going forward.

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Our Power Grids require Reliability, Resilience and Risk management.

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The pressure on our Power Grids needs urgent attention

There is a growing, possibly intense focus and awareness that our Energy Grids worldwide are in serious trouble.

The significant changing consumption needs and generation patterns are causing significant concerns that existing ageing infrastructure is becoming a major source of risk to power grid safety, reliability and financial exposure and in failing to deliver power on the expected 24 x 7, we need.

If you look at ten of the top issues that are causing a growing crisis

  1. Ageing or outdated infrastructure
  2. Supply chain failures are delaying infrastructure equipment changes.
  3. A continued public opposition delaying infrastructure options and bureaucratic barriers
  4. There is a continued lack of sizable funding to make major changes
  5. System redundancies and stranded assets and the issues of legacy write-offs
  6. The increased complexity of the grid is still unclear in its final generation mix design
  7. Cyber Attacks are continuing and exposing significant weakness
  8. Extreme weather events are growing and exposing grid vulnerabilities.
  9. Previously poor project management, inconsistencies in capital spending
  10. Changing demand needs, the acceleration of electrification and the lack of new infrastructure

The need is to find effective responses and considerations of the options, managing change simultaneously while maintaining increasing power demand.

The energy system is being disrupted, and where there are levels of high disruption, there is always uncertainty, debate and learning to take risker views of the future, creating a lot of unease and hesitation. As quoted by one senior person, “we have an inadequate view of what – positively, and in detail – we’re building towards.

As the sector transforms at such an accelerating rate, the move towards ambitious decarbonization targets has required that clean energy is explored in all those options and required to be pushed to the forefront of future solutions. Integrating that variable green energy onto the grid and hardening infrastructure assets against extreme weather are proving some industry’s most pressing challenges.

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The power to unlock energy is through innovation

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The energy shifts we are undertaking within all the energy transitions today do allow real innovation opportunities when you survey the innovation landscape.

There is complexity in all the energy transitions going on. Still, the ones that can see the possibilities and ‘energize’ through new innovative solutions hold the future in our hands to capitalize upon as fast as we can.

All we can predict is that the pace of innovation and energy transition will speed and then scale up to meet the needs of a world rapidly wanting to decarbonize. The companies that are investors in innovation will be the best placed to capitalize on this.

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My twelve energy Christmas words or triggers that will drive my 2023 thinking

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So as we wind down towards Christmas and begin to look out into 2023, I thought, what are my triggering points on the Energy Transition?

So I thought I’d turn these into a simple list of my twelve energy Christmas words or phrases that will drive my Energy Transition thinking in 2023

  1. The energy challenge
  2. Inclusive energy futures
  3. Innovation technology
  4. Complexity unravelling
  5. Unchecked consumption
  6. Stranded Assets
  7. Emerging Energy Platforms
  8. Energy backbone
  9. Climate change essential actions
  10. Clean energy innovator
  11. Pathways, landscapes and roadmaps
  12. Transition management

I made an Energy wish list for 2022, and all I can say is it was wildly optimistic, so this year, I’ll stick with my simple Christmas triggers.

So what trigger words or energy phases will drive your Energy work or thinking in 2023?

Add them below

Accelerating the new Energy Ecosystem

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Accelerating the Energy Transition
https://innovating4energy.com

Over the next twenty to thirty years, the Energy System will undergo a massive transition to achieve that eventual 2050 net-zero target of decarbonizing the energy system fully, resulting in a clean, climate-resilient energy transformation.

I have been looking in a short mini-series at the need to structure the Energy System in a very systematic and consistent evaluation as we undertake the changes from a fossil-reliant ecosystem into a clean, renewable one, with the overriding obligation to address climate change.

In this third and final post of this series, I focus on 1. Innovation & Ingenuity, 2. Experimentation & Rapid Pilots, and 3. Leapfrog Opportunities and discuss a value proposal.

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Building out the new Energy Ecosystem

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Building out the new Energy Ecosystem

I firmly believe the Energy System needs a very systematic and consistent evaluation as we undertake the changes from a fossil-reliant ecosystem into a clean, renewable one, with the overriding obligation to address climate change.

As you consider a change of this magnitude, you recognize how complicated this becomes, and the deeper your thinking becomes, hence why I like thinking through this with the use of mind maps.

I would argue we need a consistent framework to keep working through all the changes that will be undertaken in the next twenty to thirty years to achieve that eventual 2050 net-zero target of decarbonizing the energy system fully;  resulting in a clean, climate-resilient energy transformation.

Within my first post, “Changing the Energy Ecosystem“, I began to lay out the need to change the energy dynamics by redirecting them away from the existing systems and structures.

This is my second post, which continues to build out the new Energy Ecosystem.

This post focuses on the two points of Reforming Business models and the needed Resolutions to take this different thinking forward, then I will take out in the third post, Innovation & Ingenuity, Experimentation & Rapid Pilots,  and Leapfrog Opportunities.

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Changing the Energy Ecosystem

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We have a very unhealthy world.

When I set up this posting site https://innovating4energy.com in December 2019, I stated within the site identity the tagline “a transition in all of our lives.” Little did I know how our lives would change at that time and continually do so in a very unhealthy geopolitical environment where collaboration is rapidly deteriorating to solve our rapidly warming planet.

I have found working in this energy transition space to be extremely hard, if not at times overwhelming. It is so complex, challenging and caught between the extremes of needed change and no change. You wonder what will happen, not just in the year 2050 as that year we need to have achieved bringing our world to a net-zero in carbon.

Just how we will be capable of transitioning to a net zero energy system by 2050, ensuring stable and affordable energy supplies, providing universal energy access, and enabling robust economic growth is seemingly getting harder to grasp than it was a year ago or even when I started this posting site. Continue reading →

Pinned to my door, my way of approaching the Energy Transition

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Pinned to my door, my way of approaching the Energy Transition

I have on the door of my office the approach I am taking to build out my understanding and pace myself in what I can absorb, translate and offer views upon on the Energy Transition.

My site www.innovating4energy.website is where I outline and see my value contribution in applying the “multiplier effect” to any discovery and validation of the Energy Transition. The value proposition is in accelerating the clients/readers’ understanding of where the potential growth and impact points with the objective of triggering a new business opportunity for it to occur.

What we offer is exploring the Energy Landscape in understanding, so this can then be translated into fresh, exciting Energy Value Positioning Offerings. Continue reading →

Unlocking your challenges and issues

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Two really important points have troubled me in the past months and given growing challenges and issues relating to the energy transition.

The failure of CoP26 lingers very heavily and now as we are caught up in the Russian- Ukrainian war we are seeing so many reverses on pledges made in Glasgow or simply waiting to see where this crisis will take us all.

It seems to be that the lack of positives is presently being defeated with all the negatives I have been recently reading about in disruption, energy risks and the growing energy crisis. A level of panic is setting in. It does seem we are losing real momentum on reducing carbon emissions as we fall back on fossil fuel supplies.

At the UN’s Cop26 climate summit in November 2021, after a quarter-century of annual negotiations that as yet have failed to deliver a fall in global emissions, countries around the world finally included the word “coal” in their concluding decision. That is now back on the agenda, with old coal mines even being reopened.

Even this belated mention of the dirtiest fossil fuel was fraught, leaving a “deeply sorry” Cop president, Alok Sharma, fighting back tears on the podium after India announced a last-minute softening of the need to “phase out coal” to “phase down coal”.

The really shocking failure at CoP26 was this.

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