Why don’t we consider renewable energy disruptive?
Why is the language of disruption predominantly absent from discussions on the transition to new energy production? Why don’t we see this in the same way as we do other technology driven developments such as Computing and Internet?

Any casual scan of public media of any sort, newspapers, TV, radio and even social media to a lesser degree, has a relatively staid message on the advance of renewable energy. The primary message to be taken away from the Australian and US experience, is that we will have a big up-hill battle to reduce carbon emissions in time to avoid drastic impact on our environment and lives. I had to spend much longer than I expected to find any really optimistic commentary, let alone any truly buoyant perspectives. Having found only a few, I was again surprised to see how little this was shared on social media.
So why can’t we see past this? Are we so attached to the idea of energy utility being out of the reach of true change? Have we conceded that the control of this market is so tight and ingrained in world economics, that it will not be subject to the forces of technology driven market disruption?
I suggest that transition to clean energy technology is truly disruptive and will be way that the energy market will be prised from the fingers of current control. This will happen from now on, despite policy decisions designed to thwart it, and without the need for intervention or incentives.
Looking at the story of Internet and Web activity as an analogous environment and ecosystem, can certainly give us some pointers to how fundamental change will emerge in energy economics.
The Internet/Web grew in a very different way to how we see power grid today. We saw a phase where ISPs emerged in every little nook and cranny, only to be slowly but surely displaced by Telcos as the only major ISPs, or the successful ISPs actually morphing into Telcos. So today, from a distribution market perspective, they seem similar.
The primary difference is the product for which the Internet serves as distribution network is so broad, diverse, distributed and still developing. Whilst the Internet grid is well and truly in the hands of major market players, the individual producers of content and services that it carries are not, and will likely never be. Sure there are key aggregators of content and service shop fronts, in Google, Facebook, Netflix and Amazon, but the content production remains generated across the widest possible distributed base.
This is the type of base that will become the “New Baseload” or DER (Distributed Energy Resources) for electrical energy. Whilst the nature of the energy product that will be produced is narrow and boringly uniform when compared to the Web, the promise of widely distributed consumer base of electrical energy production and storage, is in no doubt.
What will bring the disruption
Once the back of the dependency on central generation fueled by commodity consumable markets is broken, the forces protecting this market will fall away to allow true investment in even more and accelerated alternative energy production and usage.
There’s nothing like a new consumer appliance market to spur innovation. In the computer market, once the Personal Computer had taken hold as the core unit of computing, the true revolution in product cost, size, efficiency and development actually started. This has culminated in the computational and storage miracles, that we now carry in our pockets and purses, spurred along by supporting force of 3/4G networks.
The likely trajectory of truly distributed consumer electrical power will have much more in common with that of personal computing and the Internet than the efforts we have seen to date to bring renewables to relatively central production scenarios, such as wind and solar farms.
Once the commodity is the technology, the game will change completely.
The prime market mover will be the change from fuel/energy unit driven, to technology and hardware driven. Imagine the race to own the IP and production rights that would allow a company to ride the next big wave of non-discretionary consumer spending. This IP race will echo, but dwarf the Samsung vs Apple SmartPhone IP wars.
Remember, it has only been about 10 years since the introduction of the smart phone, and we have already seen several generations of radical technology improvement. It’s not hard to imagine the day when you are looking at your smart power console at home, and the temperature you have been able to maintain in your living room, to consider if it’s time to upgrade to the latest gen power modules. Each generation of Consumer DER technology will bring a price/capacity advantage that, as with other technology disruption, sees migration to new product and business models inevitable on price alone.
Consumers to Generators
Unlike the Web/Computing model though, it is unlikely that so many of us will continue to be pure consumers and not generators of some sort. The distributed power market is starting with a reasonable percentage of self generators with the proliferation of 5Kw Solar roof tops, but to date almost negligible self storage. To support the full swing to the New Baseload scenario, the expansion of semi-centralised renewable generation and innovative storage must continue for some years. The utilisation of distributed power sources will not take hold until the core grid model has already shifted to accommodate a much larger number of instantly dispatchable power sources.
The nature of wind and solar farms deployment will mean a natural increase in distributed generation anyway. In a few years the increasing numbers will be managed by complex algorithms that support not just consistent supply, but much more dynamic market models than the current National Energy Markets. This will be the predecessor to New Baseload management, but the shift will still be significant. The move from an environment where a person comes to read my power consumption by sight, to a fully autonomous network, that already knows what capacity I have; when and at what rate I consume it; then offers my excess to the local market; under an agreed pricing model, is not trivial.
Kick starting
Much of the core technology and management algorithms already exist. The mistake is to believe it will continue to evolve slowly under the same market constraints as the fuel commodity backed model, which is innovation stifling.
As usual it will take motivated first movers to kick start the first wave. The next wave, will be where local generation has become a standard option available from your energy provider, who has then got a grid smart enough for them to profit from your generation. This is already starting to emerge, with finance bundles and monthly billing, which look very similar to current spend profiles. This is a real transition to renewable, but essentially maintaining their market control, and without radical benefit to the consumer. Unfortunately this is the end of the vision for a lot of commentators.
Real Disruption
The third wave will be much less comfortable for the energy supply chain, where the disruption pushes down to between you and your grid supplier. When locally available generation and storage modules with managed local load are so efficient that, the market relationship with the grid becomes balanced. At this point the price of the power itself becomes moot, with transmission costs representing more than generation. With drastically reduced power distribution income, grid companies could move to be hardware and vested interest finance vehicles, like so many car and phone retailers. With that shift, the commodity is truly the technology and the gates are open to the same ongoing development cycles as the computing, telecommunications and home entertainment markets.
The possibilities from there become really interesting. Swathes of Tesla inspired high efficiency electrical power generation and load control methods exist, that have been actively suppressed to serve the interests of the fuel commodity markets. These will fall onto newly fertile ground in home and automotive energy technology development. If you think this is all discredited fantasy, visit this NASA site and search for unconventional energy technology. A whole lot more of this type of latent potential IP is held in the vaults of current energy and automotive companies, which will actually see the light of day, once the technology is the commodity.
What true human benefit will this bring
Further questions that are not being asked, are around what else will the energy revolution bring. Where will the true disruption occur. I will not attempt cover these broad questions here. The one thing that is certain is that the broad benefit of this disruption will be far in excess of the old story line that “coal is the only power source which can lift people out of poverty”.
The acceleration of capability and capacity for a world wide consumer distributed power market free of fuel economics should leave the computing/internet revolution looking like horse and buggy on a dirt road, because the stakes are so high. Unlike the Internet revolution, the revolution in energy availability and management, can have immediate and long lasting positive impacts on the welfare and productivity of the world population.
So I am optimistic and excited, as you should also be. Not just about quickly meeting the required carbon pollution reduction to curtail climate change, but for the world to actually be a better, fairer place for many more people.