There is a real urgency that we transform our energy systems.

Where can innovation help within the Energy Transition to rapidly advance it?

The opening answer is everywhere within the energy system. Technological and systemic innovation is critical to the end-user sectors of transport, industry, and buildings and 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 within the energy transition. We all need a sense of bearing or a compass that shows us the way. Our job is is “spark” and ignite innovation within the Energy Transition. To give innovation more resources and support.

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 highly systematically. The need is to continually 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.

Innovation needs to be at the top of its game, to be accelerated.

The energy transition that the world is undertaking is one of the most critical areas where innovation needs to be at its very best, that top of the game to make the level of change necessary. We need to deploy every innovative tool to leverage ideas and discoveries and then accelerate the validation into a commercialization path, sooner than later.

Innovation needs to get out of the laboratories, moved from theory to application, and off the desk of those executives who fail to see the urgency of change we need to achieve the energy transition. Innovation has risk always associated with it but that imperative to push the boundaries does need always to be constantly in our minds; global warming is our “burning platform”, and we need to ramp up our need for solutions that can reduce greenhouse gases, redesign energy generation, transmission, and distribution.

Solutions that evolve them and allow them to manage their energy solutions in a rapidly decentralizing energy system. We need to keep pushing for more innovation from the existing solutions found in wind and solar solutions jockeying to replace oil, gas, and coal. We need to discover different methods of storing and distributing electricity. We also need to keep exploring new business models to radically alter the engagement with the final consumers.

Pushing our present understanding, looking beyond the knowns

Today the solutions are centred on decarbonization, applying digitalization, and switching to an energy system that is more decentralized than at present. It is finding imaginative, innovative 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 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 will be displaced in any change of this magnitude.

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 per cent of the 1990 level by 2050.

We have an awful lot of innovation to do

We need to switch from fossil fuel to renewables. The whole shift of significant invested assets for power generation and distribution has 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, chemicals, or our transportation systems if we wish to achieve any positive outlook of curbing carbon emissions and moving onto a pathway towards a zero-carbon future.

It will be the ability to harness the existing with the new. This is the role of innovation, to deliver the changes by being the bridge and being the catalyst of change with new technology and innovative solutions.

Innovation must be at the forefront of the energy change; otherwise, we will fail to deliver on the 2050 commitments and goals, and that will have consequences for our very existence as we know it.